I’ve written about this before but it really is such a good solution for so many that I feel I need to revisit the topic.
For many years now Microsoft has dominated the office productivity software market with products like Work, Excel, Power Point, and Publisher, banishing the likes of WordPerfect, Lotus 1 2 3, SuperCalc, and so many others, to a distant memory. Productivity products like these are often bundled together into what is known as an office productivity suite. When Word, Excel, Outlook, Power Point, Publisher, and other software packages are bundled together like this it is known as Microsoft Office. And it is quite expensive; often several hundred dollars.
Many work-at-home entrepreneurs find they can neither afford, nor justify, the expense of such a product and, for those who are honest and don’t want to use a pirated (stolen) copy, there seemed little to do. Some made use of Microsoft Office’s poor second cousin, Microsoft Works, but they usually found that many other people couldn’t read the files it produced unless they, too, had a copy of Works. Works seems dated and doesn’t provide all the necessary functions required by today’s home-based office, either.
There is another solution, however. OpenOffice.org is not only an option, many would say it is actually a better choice. Perhaps the best thing about it is it is also completely free.
Some might think a free product like this must be a cheap imitation. Nothing could be farther form the truth. OpenOffice.org originated as StarOffice, an office suite developed by StarDivision and acquired by Sun Microsystems in August 1999. You may not know much about Sun Microsystems but I can tell you they are a major player in the corporate computer market.
StarOffice turned out not to be an avenue Sun was ultimately committed to so the source code of the suite was released to public access in July 2000 with the aim of reducing the dominant market share of Microsoft Office by providing a free and open alternative. The OpenOffice.org project was born.
The OpenOffice.org project is primarily sponsored by Oracle Corporation, another major player who is less than friendly to Microsoft. Other major corporate contributors include Novell, RedHat, RedFlag CH2000, IBM, and Google. If you know anything about the Microsoft vs. the other guys in the computer arena, you may notice a theme shaping up here. There are also many smaller corporate players and, in the tradition of open source development, many more individual contributors.
Both the project and the software suite are commonly referred to as just OpenOffice (or Open Office), but this term is actually a trademark held by a company in the Netherlands thus requiring the project to adopt OpenOffice.org as its formal name. The suite operates on Windows, Mac, LINUX, Solaris, BSD, OpenVMS, OS/2 and IRIX, ie: just about anyone with a home office.
OpenOffice.org competes directly with Microsoft Office and generally emulates its look and feel, though proponents will say it does many things better and has unique functions as well. It can read and write most of the file formats found in Microsoft Office, and many other applications – an essential feature of the suite for many users who need cross-product compatibility (ie: the ability to read virtually any file your clients, associates, or friends, might send you).
OpenOffice.org has been found to actually be able to open files of older versions of Microsoft Office and even damaged files that newer versions of Microsoft Office itself cannot open. However, it cannot open older Word for Macintosh (MCW) files. The easy solution for this issue is to open the older files on the Mac in BBEdit or TextEdit, then SAVE AS to OpenOffice format. Nice!
Oh, and did I mention this power house product is FREE?!?