Oct30

Open Office

Posted by Galaxy EP on Oct 30, 2009

Get the Open Office Suite here!

Description

Open Office is both an open-source product and a project. The product is a multiplatform office productivity suite. It includes desktop applications such as a word processor, a spreadsheet program, a presentation manager, and a drawing program, with a user interface and feature set similar to those of other office suites. Open Office 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. Open Office runs on Solaris, Linux (including PPC Linux), and Windows. Written in C++ and with documented APIs licensed under the LGPL and SISSL open-source protocols, Open Office allows any knowledgeable developer to benefit from the source.

Review

A credible rival to MS Office, Open Office includes powerful applications for making text documents, spreadsheets, presentations, diagrams, and databases, as well as HTML and XML documents. Not only does it let you edit basic documents, such as letters and faxes, it also handles equations and complex and multipart documents with bibliographies, reference tables, and indexes.

The interface is similar to that of MS Office, and even advanced Office users will find almost everything they’re used to: templates, collaborative features (versions, recording changes), macros, and even a programming language. OOo, as it’s known, lets you open and save documents in formats as diverse as MS Office formats, PDF, HTML, and XML. It can also import files from those formats, as well as WordPerfect and others. However, it normally saves files in the open-standard Oasis OpenDocument XML format, for maximum compatibility with other applications.

The latest versions of Open Office have seen a spurt of growth in the extensions available for the program. These include templates for professional writers, an export tool for bidirectional functionality with Google Docs, blog publishing, and others. Blog publishing assistance especially strikes us as a natural area for word processing to grow toward.

We were pleased to find that stability has improved too. No doubt about it, the multilingual and crossplatform Open Office is a compelling option for anyone in search of an alternative office suite.

Download
To download an English version of OpenOffice.org, simply select your operating system from the list below.

Windows (All) Download