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Office Productivity

Are you fed up with Microsoft's license fees and forced upgrade paths?

OpenOffice.org is a free office suite of applications that is directly comparable with Microsoft Office. The project itself is supported by Sun Microsystems, who in July 2000 released the source code with the intention of reducing Microsoft's market share. OpenOffice.org is free software and available under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL).

OpenOffice.org can read and write to all the standard Microsoft Office file formats (excluding Microsoft Word for MAC) and can either be configured to run alongside Microsoft Office or configured to open Word, Excel and Powerpoint documents by default. Although originally Linux software, the suite has recently been developed to run on other operating systems such as Windows and Solaris.

Many of the features in OpenOffice.org have been designed to mirror those found in Microsoft Office and all of the included applications work closely to provide an integrated office suite.

"To create, as a community, the leading international office suite that will run on all major platforms and provide access to all functionality and data through open-component based APIs and an XML-based file format."

Source: OpenOffice.org Mission Statement

Migrating to OpenOffice.org

The Open Source Software Company have a multitude of experience when it comes to the migration to OpenOffice.org from commercial offerings such as Microsoft Office. We can examine your current business practices and advise on the benefits that an open source solution such as OpenOffice.org can bring.

  • Its open source software! As the source code is readily available, developers are able to inspect, modify and enhance the software meaning it will continually evolve.
  • Maintaining and upgrading Microsoft Office is expensive. The total cost of ownership (TCO) for acquiring OpenOffice.org are next to nothing, which is an attractive alternative to Microsoft's licence fees.
  • Cross compatibility with multiple operating systems such as Linux, Windows, MacOS, Solaris.
  • No loss of file format compatibility as OpenOffice.org can read and write to existing Microsoft formats such as .doc, .xls and .ppt.
  • All OpenOffice.org packages are able to export to Adobe PDF format. In addition, the OpenOffice Writer produces clean, standards compliant HTML code (unlike the bloated code that was churned out from Microsoft Word).

Although compelling, the above benefits are merely the tip of the iceberg when you migrate to OpenOffice.org. The REAL benefit from using OpenOffice.org is its ability to use an open file format (ODF). In contrast, Microsoft maintain complete control over the file formats found in their Office suite, which makes it impossible for other software developers to implement these formats (for example only Microsoft Office applications can talk to each other). The open standard found in OpenOffice.org such as this means that anyone can implement it, which can only result in extensive integration and interoperability with other open source packages.

Read more about the advantages of the OpenOffice.org open file format:

White Paper: Advantages of the OpenOffice.org XML File Format [852k] *

* Requires Abobe Reader

More about OpenOffice.org

The OpenOffice.org suite includes the following powerful applications:

OpenOffice.org Writer

A word processor similar in look and feel to Microsoft Word, containing a comparable set of functions and tools. Unlike Microsoft Word, Writer is able to export to Portable Document Format (PDF) without any additional software, in addition to providing a WYSIWYG editor for designing and exporting web pages. Microsoft Word was notorious for bloated HTML code when editing web pages, this is not the case when using Writer, which produces clean standards compliant code.

OpenOffice.org Calc

A spreadsheet package that contains a number of features not present in Microsoft Excel, such as a system to allow users to automatically define a series for graphing based on the layout of a table and the ability to export spreadsheets directly to PDF format.

OpenOffice.org Impress

Presentation software similar in look and feel to Microsoft Powerpoint. Its major advantage over Powerpoint is its ability to export presentations into Adobe Flash (SWF) format, allowing them to be used on a website. Although ready-made templates do not come bundled with the Impress software, there are many templates available free online.

OpenOffice.org Base

A database package to rival Microsoft Access. Both pieces of software are very similar in their functions, both being able to connect to a wide range of databases including Access databases (JET), ODBC data sources and MySQL/PostgreSQL.

OpenOffice.org Draw

Drawing software similar to CorelDraw but offering a more limited set of features. Draw enables the manipulation of shapes and can be used to produce complex flowcharts using versatile 'connectors'.

OpenOffice.org Math

A software tool used to create and edit mathematical formulae. Formulae can be embedded within other OpenOffice.org documents such as those created with Writer. It has support for multiple fonts and can export directly to PDF format.