OpenOffice.org 1.1.0: Why Pay $300 for Microsoft Office?
Written: Dec 22 '03 (Updated Dec 22 '03)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Free, Interoperable with Microsoft Office, Free
Cons: Some features are not as polished as Microsoft Office
The Bottom Line: Why pay $300 for Microsoft Office? OpenOffice.org 1.1.0 does everything that Office does and somethings even better. And the $0 price tag doesn't hurt either.
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| mookiekong's Full Review: ArcMedia OpenOffice 1.0.1 (Windows) (GAR451) |
What's worse than Microsoft's $300 plus price tag on their Office suite? The way they treat all their customers like criminals and have them “activate” their software. Let me suggest something to Microsoft: Don't price your software so expensive and people won't steal it. Well, it's too late for Microsoft to heed to that advice because the Open Source community has come up with a free alternative to Microsoft Office and it does much better on all fronts, including pricing: Free.
For most of us, we are accustomed to using Microsoft Office since we most likely all use it at work. But, what happens when we need to type something up at home? Well, some people do the illegal thing and take a copy of the software home with them and install it on their systems. To you people I say: Bad, bad people. And now since Microsoft is forcing everyone to “activate” their software, this sort of piracy should be curbed a bit. Others look for alternatives, but they are all expensive. Not OpenOffice.org 1.1.0 though, it's free price tag and feature set are comparable to Microsoft Office and it can even interoperate with Microsoft Office.
OpenOffice.org 1.1.0 comes with components that match MS Office, except for Outlook and Access. To get something that matches the latter, you can buy Sun's StarOffice 7.0 which is OpenOffice.org 1.1.0 but with Adabas Database bundled. For word processing there is OpenOffice.org Writer, for spreadsheets there is OpenOffice.org Calc, for presentations there is OpenOffice.org Impress, and there is even a drawing component.
What To Expect
Before we start looking at the different components of the suite though, we have to all agree and understand that with MS Office, there are only a few specific features that we call useful. Most of us, myself included, only use 10-20% of the “features” that Microsoft has put into MS Office. The other stuff that Microsoft throws in there is just fluff that they put in just so that they can convince another IT staff to buy a new revision of the MS Office suite.
Suite Features
As a whole, the OpenOffice.org suite has a lot to offer. There is PDF export from any of its components. The PDF export will let you save any of your documents, spreadsheets or even presentations as a PDF file. It is not just a simple export either since all the requisite PDF fields can be filled in based on what the properties of your file is (Author, Keywords, Summary, etc.) OpenOffice.org can also export presentations to the Flash format for posting on the web.
The OpenOffice.org file formats for each of the components are an open file format that anyone can develop for. They are small also, the file formats are XML-based files that are zipped up (compressed). If you take any OpenOffice.org file and change its file extension to .zip, you can use your favourite unzip program to look inside. Inside you'll find a few XML files that are readable with a text editor. If you feel like writing your own XML parsing application to read the OpenOffice.org stuff, you're free too. Try to do that with the closed and proprietary formats that Microsoft Office uses. In the future, would you rather have your files in a format that is open and readable or in a closed proprietary format (that could have no program to read it since Microsoft maybe out of business then)?
The move from Microsoft Office over to OpenOffice.org takes a little bit of time, but not much. Most people can make the move within a day or two of poking around. There are some stuff that is in different places – for instance the word count feature in Microsoft Office is Tools | Word Count; in OpenOffice.org it is in Files | Properties | Statistics. Otherwise, some people will not even notice the difference between the two products.
OpenOffice.org Writer
So, here we are, lets break OpenOffice.org down into its components and look at them. Writer is the component that I spend the most time using. It is the workhorse word processor of the suite. Writer includes a spell-checker that is useful, it does the red-squiggly line to let you know that you have spelled something wrong. You can right-click the word to select the correct spelling. There is a built-in thesaurus. Writer works and acts much like Word does. All of the useful features that you find in Word are here in Writer. Writer can easily import all your Word documents.
The feature that I most enjoy about Writer is the auto-completion feature. This will annoying some at first, it did me, and some of you may even turn it off. But, I beg you not to because this is a pretty interesting and useful feature that you won't be able to live without after using it. Basically, it acts just like your web browser does when you type a URL into the address bar. If you have typed it before, the web browser will try to find the correct address on-the-fly to complete the address for you. Same thing inside of Writer, when I am typing a word, Writer will automatically try to complete the word for me as I am typing. If the word is correct then I just hit the Enter key to fill in the rest. If it is not, I go ahead and finish typing what I was typing. It sounds strange at first and feels even weirder when it starts to work, but it is an ingenious idea. I use Writer for home and when I use Word at work from time to time, I just miss auto-completion. It is a very useful tool.
Word X on the Macintosh platform has a floating box that has styles in it. Word on Windows does not. The floating style box is a very useful tool and it shows up in Writer. You can select any piece of text, then double-click a style to apply the style. Or, if you have a style you like and want to change the one in the box, highlight the block of text that has the style and drag that text directly into the box onto the style name.
OpenOffice.org Calc
OpenOffice.org Calc is my second most used component. The spreadsheet component again has all the features that are useful in Excel and a bit more. With Calc I can do charts and graphs, I can do my spreadsheets and use all the built-in functions. The functions list is very inclusive and I have not found yet a function in Excel that is not in Calc. I have found some functions in Calc out of the box that are not in Excel out of the box (you have to add different Statistical packages to get functionality in Excel). Some complain that there is no pivot tables in OpenOffice.org Calc, but they are wrong, it is just called something else. If you find yourself using pivot tables in Excel a lot, look for the DataPilot feature in the Data menu of Calc. It does exactly the same thing as Excel. The DataPilot is not as polished a tool as Excel's Pivot Tables, but it does what is needed.
OpenOffice.org Impress
OpenOffice.org Impress I use the least of. I have done a presentation in it for a 400-person class, but other than that, I have limited working time with Impress. What I can tell you is something that I observed as I was working on my presentation for that class. When I worked on the presentation, it had some 75 slides and each slide included some picture in it. When I saved the presentation as a PowerPoint file it came out to around 7MB in size. I gave that file to my co-worker who looked over the presentation and made some adjustments. He then saved the presentation and gave it back to me. When he used his PowerPoint to save the presentation, it came out to some 13MB! We did this switch a few times and each time I saved it, it came to be around 7MB and his to be around 13MB. That shows just how efficient OpenOffice.org is even with Microsoft's format!
Try It Yourself
In the end though, the real way that you can find out if you like OpenOffice.org 1.1.0 is if you get it yourself and try it. And with an Open Source piece of software you can do this with no risk to your pocketbook since it is free. Go to www.OpenOffice.org and download a copy of OpenOffice.org 1.1.0 for yourself to try out. Run it right next to Microsoft Office and see how you like it. I will guarantee you that when the next version of Microsoft Office comes out, you'll really have to try hard to find a reason to pay that $300 or more for Microsoft Office when a free alternative like OpenOffice.org is out there. OpenOffice.org 1.1.0 is available on multiple platforms including, but not limited to Windows 95/98 (something that new Microsoft Offices do not support), Windows 2000, Windows XP, Linux, Solaris, and X11 under MacOS X.
Conclusion
OpenOffice.org 1.1.0 is the free alternative to Microsoft Office. It does everything that Microsoft Office does and it does it for no money. It can interoperate with Microsoft Office in ways that even Microsoft can't do well. You can work with Microsoft Office formated files or work with the open OpenOffice.org files. Either way, you'll be doing your work with a better package that cost nothing. And if you don't believe me, it'll only cost you some time to download OpenOffice.org to see what it is like. I highly recommend all of you that don't have an office suite, have an illegal copy of Microsoft Office, or are considering Microsoft Office to consider OpenOffice.org 1.1.0. This office suite offers the best return on your investment. Don't miss out.
Recommended:
Yes
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mookiekong
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Location: San Jose, CA, USA
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