Several months ago I decided to ditch Microsoft Office in favour of the Open Source alternative called OpenOffice.org. I figured that I bitched so much about MS that it was hypocritical of me to use its products when there was a perfectly good, and free, option available.
I've been using OpenOffice.org for several months and I can't say I've ever been sorry I made the switch. OpenOffice contains an excellent word processing program called Writer, a spreadsheet program called Calc, a html editor called Web, an equations program called Math, a presentation program called Impress, and a drawing program called Draw.
As a user of Microsoft's products for a long time I did find some of the differences between Office and OpenOffice somewhat frustrating. However, enter the excellent OpenOffice.org 1.0 Resource Kit written by Solveig Haughland and Floyd Jones to the rescue. I had already downloaded OpenOffice from the Internet so I didn't need the handy CD that comes with the weighty textbook that contains the OpenOffice program itself.
The book is accessible, simply-written, and enthusiastic about using the OpenOffice suite of programs. If you were a user of StarOffice (OpenOffice's earlier incarnation), there is information on how to upgrade to the more recent version. As you can imagine I haven't read the book from cover to cover (it's 1020 pages long), but it sits on my desk permanently, and it's my first port of call whenever I encounter something I want to do which I haven't tried before in OpenOffice. Thus far I've never been thwarted in my desire to customise my toolbars, spellcheckers or macros, since like most people, I like to have everything set up in a certain way. I've never had a compatibility problem either, and OpenOffice can open up MS documents, and I can save my OpenOffice documents in an MS format if necessary. I'm particularly fond of the fact that OpenOffice saves all its files in a very compact xml format. This means that files are much smaller in size. Not that it's such a problem since hard drives are so large these days, but it's the principle of avoiding bloatage that is admirable.
Article comments
1 - cjones
I dont actually use Open Office but I do own it with a Linux SUSE 8.2 distro. I find the software more than adequate especcially as a student. Go Open Source. I hope Microsoft gets reduced to a distant memory because of their monopolistic ways...