ITinfo: Microsoft Office Has A Viable Competitor

Competition for Microsoft Office

A great free alternative for SOHO and corporate users

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Microsoft Office Has A Viable Competitor

by Dave Murphy
ISSN 1535-3613

Microsoft Office has a viable competitor, and best of all, it's free. The office productivity suite shares file formats with common business applications, including those of Microsoft Office. Now SOHO businesses don't have to shell out $499 or more per computer to create professional documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.

OpenOffice.org is both an Open Source product and a project. The product is a multi-platform office productivity suite. It includes the key desktop applications, such as a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation manager, and drawing program, with a user interface and feature set similar to other office suites’. Sophisticated and flexible, OpenOffice.org also works transparently with a variety of file formats, including those of Microsoft Office.

Localizations of OpenOffice.org are available in 27 languages with more being constantly added by the community. OpenOffice.org runs stably and natively on Solaris, Linux (including PPC Linux), and Windows. Additional ports, such as for FreeBSD, IRIX, and Mac OS X, are in various stages of completion.

Written in C++ and with documented APIs licensed under the LGPL and SISSL Open Source licenses, OpenOffice.org allows any knowledgeable developer to benefit from the source. And, because the file format for OpenOffice.org is XML, interoperability is easy, making future development and adoption more certain.

OpenOffice, a 50-megabyte download from www.openoffice.org, includes word processing, spreadsheet and presentation programs, comparable to Microsoft Office's Word, Excel and PowerPoint. In a week, Sun Microsystems will release a commercial version of the suite, called StarOffice 6.0, for less than $100. Sun's version will add a database management program, extra fonts and clip art, support for more file formats (such as WordPerfect), and better support and training. Other than these bells and whistles, the two suites, OpenOffice and StarOffice, offer identical capabilities.

Dave's Opinion

We have had an ongoing discussion in the office about the considerations of recommending noncommercial office productivity suites to our clients. Many don't need to share files with outside organizations, with the exception of Word .doc files, and these can be read with Windows's WordPad program.

OpenOffice is a must have for all SOHO computer users. It's also a must-review for corporate IS departments who are looking to save a bundle of cash on each employee's workstation.

We trainers should be excited because a new application suite means more opportunities for training. So, if you're a trainer, you better download this package. If you've got access to a Linux box, download the Linux version, too.

Call for Comments

What do you think? Leave your comments on the message center.

References

Openoffice.org
Message Center

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updated May 13, 2002
http://dgl.com/itinfo/2002/it020513.html