Introduction

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Software

Have you ever heard of OpenOffice.org? According to their web site they provide "a fully-featured office suite compatible with leading office products". And it's at my favorite price, free!


I downloaded a copy and installed it. It's a rather large download (about 120 megabytes for a Windows platform) so you need a high speed connection. I have DSL and it took about 15 minutes for the download. It is also available on CD-ROM from some distributors for a fee (see bottom of this page).


So what do you get for free? You get six productivity programs that can do word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, databases, drawing, and math calculations. Here's a brief description of each of them.


Writer - You can create text documents with imbedded charts, tables and graphics. Your work can be saved in several formats including PDF, HTML, and Microsoft Word. It has the expected features like spell check and auto-correct and comes with a variety of templates.


Calc - This is a spreadsheet program that allows you to read, modify and save Microsoft Excel files. Note, however, that it can't handle macros written using Microsoft's VBA.


Impress - This program can be used to create slide show presentations that contain charts, drawing objects and multimedia.


Chart - As its name implies, this program is used to create charts. The charts can then be imported into documents, slide shows and spreadsheets.


Draw - This program lets you create vector graphics using lines and curves and then export the results into a number of common image formats.


Base - This program allows you to create databases and also to connect to external databases such as MySQL and Oracle.


I experimented with the word processor and spreadsheet programs. They had no problem importing a number of my documents and spreadsheets created with Microsoft Office. As these are the only programs I typically use at home I didn't try any of the others.


If you require a high-degree of compatibility with Microsoft Office programs OpenOffice may not be for you. But, if you just want to be able to create documents and spreadsheets on your own and also have the ability to save them in a format that someone else using Microsoft Office products can read, OpenOffice is a great bargain and worth looking into.

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