Open Office, The Open-Source Office Suite

Open Office is a free, easy-to-use system that does what it says on the box. Its openness to different file formats makes it invaluable; for example, it can save and read Microsoft Office file formats, and save documents as PDFs. Open Office is the main office for free systems today. Because of that, Java is downplayed, because Open Office cannot really have Java as a core component. Open Office is a completely free open-source office suite, providing tools for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, databases, and more. While it may not seem fairly important to many at first, having an open source solution to office productivity tools is something more schools should consider in these ever-increasing budget crunch times.

Open Office is a professional quality application suite unlike most of the open source projects I’ve seen. It has all the features of MS-Office and you can even open and save all the MS Document Formats. Open office is not quite there yet. I have also found that documents from MS-WORD take less disk space than open office. Open Office is a free and open source alternative to the Microsoft Office application suite and contains many drop in replacement programs to Office’s popular Word, Excel and PowerPoint programs. If you would like to learn more about using Open Office, there are many easy to use tutorials available at LearnOpenOffice.org.

OpenOffice.org (OOo) is a free office and business productivity suite that is a good alternative to costly Microsoft Office suite. Not only is OpenOffice.org is free to download, use and distribute, it’s also an open-source project, multiplatform, multilingual and compatible with all other major office suites, including Microsoft Office 2003, XP, 2000 and 97, with support for Office 2007 slated in upcoming release of OpenOffice. (Maybe on this Oct. 13th, The OOo will release version 3)
OpenOffice.org is both a fully-featured office suite compatible with leading office products, and a virtual community working through OpenOffice.org’s numerous projects . The community comes together at www.openoffice.org to develop, support, and promote the use of OpenOffice.org

OpenOffice is supported by a very active community. If you run into any kind of problem with a component of the suite don’t hesitate to ask for help in the support forum. OpenOffice.org uses the ODF as its native file format as well as fully supporting other common file formats (including Microsoft Office). OpenOffice.org runs on all major platforms, including all versions of Windows (Vista, too), Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, and is available in over one hundred languages. Open Office is what they call Open Source software which means that anyone can world on improving it, and thousands are doing just that - including many professionals. Open Office is NOT just a second-class stand-in or replacement.
Open office is a full featured Office suite. It includes a Word Processor (Writer), a spread sheet (Calc), a presentation program (Impress), a database program, (Base) A graphics editor program (Draw) and a tool for creating and editing mathematical formulas