Free Office Suite - OpenOffice
OpenOffice.org is a multiplatform and multilingual office suite and an open-source project. Compatible with all other major office suites, the product is free to download, use, and distribute.
Software is one of the biggest and most expensive nuisances when buying a new computer. New copies of useful programs can total hundreds of pounds in extra costs. But what if it were possible to get the same functionality or better, for free?
OpenOffice.org is, as the name would suggest, a full open-source suite of office programs. Every program you need in an office suite is in there, from a word processor to a presentation creator similar to PowerPoint. The suite was originally developed by Sun Microsystems and was aimed solely at providing a free alternative to Microsoft Office. It can even open and save files in any Microsoft Office format.
It has become so popular that Microsoft now makes a compatibility pack to open OpenOffice.org files in its own program!
You can download the complete OpenOffice.org Suite from here
The 76MB download expands into five applications:
- Writer word processor
- Calc spreadsheet
- Impress presentations program
- Base database program, and
- Math equation editor
OpenOffice.org uses an XML-based file format by default, but it opens and saves files in MS Office format seamlessly, without special prompts or warnings.
Tests show impressive compatibility with MS Office documents, although Word macros — notorious for security problems — won’t run in OpenOffice.org. Heavily formatted Word files opened in Writer almost exactly as they did in Word, even when they included tracked changes, drawing objects, and other advanced features.
Writer adds a PDF-export feature that Word doesn’t offer, a find-and-replace feature that uses wildcards and regular expressions, and an impressive macro and scripting feature that organizes your macros in a tree-structured display. Advanced find-and-replace operations (such as those involving fonts and attributes like italics) are easier to manage in Writer than in Word’s confusing Find dialog, although Word makes it easier to find special characters like dashes.
The Calc spreadsheet opens most Excel files with few problems (save for some minor mislabeling and misalignments in charts), though charts based on pivot tables tended to be blank. Generally Calc’s menus and dialogs are easier to navigate than the corresponding ones in Excel.
Impress presentation software is feature-rich and easily managed, with tabs for notes, outlines, slide-sorting, and other conveniences.
But OpenOffice.org can’t do everything that the MS Office suite can do. There’s no online collaboration or Smart Tags, for example, no grammar checking, and no highly flexible outlining, smart table formatting, or research task pane.
Being free software, it has no tech support in the traditional sense but the web site does host a huge community-based support forum where you can usually get fast, detailed answers to any queries not covered under the FAQ section.
Anyone who doesn’t want to pay Microsoft’s premium prices for rarely used features may prefer this free suite. It does mostly everything that typical users need it to do, and does some things better than MS Office.
You can download the complete OpenOffice.org Suite from here
Original source of test information:
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microsoft office format, multilingual office suite, office programs, openoffice, open source, pdf export, word processor
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