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Considering the price, OpenOffice is downright outstanding.
 technofile
Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983

T e c h n o f i l e
Forget the high-priced spread and try the free Microsoft Office-compatible suite from OpenOffice.org


Feb. 19, 2006


By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2006, Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2006, The Post-Standard

   You can't get Microsoft Office free unless you steal it. The cheapest version of Office costs about $130 (for the Student/Teacher edition), but normal folks who have no school or college connections usually pay a lot more -- as much as much as $499 if you pay the full list price.
   But you don't have to pay a cent if you're willing to settle for second best. I've been using a free alternative to Office for many years, through a number of revisions. The latest version of this free software, called OpenOffice, is exceptional in some ways. Considering the price, it's downright outstanding.
   First, the good news. OpenOffice (officially called "OpenOffice.org") is a widely respected suite of programs designed to perform the same functions as the programs in Microsoft Office. Industry figures show that it has about 10 percent of the office-suite market worldwide.
   OpenOffice is available without cost for Windows, Linux and Macintosh OS X, and comes in 65 languages. You can download it from www.openoffice.org.
   OpenOffice has an unusual parentage. It's based on (and is almost identical to) StarOffice, a commercial office suite from Sun Microsystems. Sun works with the OpenOfice developers to make sure both Star Office and OpenOffice have similar features each time either one is revised.
   The most important program in any such suite is the word processor, and in both Microsoft Office and OpenOffice the word processor is superb. Microsoft Word, the word processor in Office, is the best program of its kind money can buy.
   For programs money can't buy, the word processor in OpenOffice, called Writer, is a knockout. It has the same menu structure and keyboard assignments as Word and does just about every normal function the same way. For most writing tasks, Writer is equal to Word.
   But note that I used the word "most." Documents that contain fancy tables and graphics might not look the same in Writer as they do in Word. If you have to pass heavily formatted Word documents back and forth among various computers for varying office uses, you'd probably be better off with Word. But if you use a word processor for such tasks as homework and office letters, OpenOffice Writer will work splendidly. (And, yes, it has an excellent spell checker.)
   Excel compatibility is mostly in the "good news" category, too. If you use Microsoft Excel professionally -- if you make money from your skill at Excel -- stick with the real thing. But in my tests of Calc, the spreadsheet program in OpenOffice, I was able to do everything I normally do in Excel, and all my Excel spreadsheets opened without a problem in Calc. Documents I created in Calc worked perfectly in Excel also.
   Microsoft's PowerPoint is slick and very easy to use, and there's nothing but more good news in the OpenOffice equivalent, called Impress. You can open, view and edit PowerPoint presentations in Impress without a problem. If you create your own presentations in Impress, you can save them as PowerPoint documents, in the Open Document XL format or even as Flash presentations. Impress is -- dare I say it? -- very impressive.
   The bad news in any Office wannabe usually involves tossing the database program to the Access wolves. Microsoft Access is difficult to clone, and not even OpenOffice comes close to offering a genuine substitute for it. As with Excel, if you make money from your skill at Access, stick with the genuine article.
   But for all the rest of us, OpenOffice's database program, called simply Base, should be sufficient. I was able to import standard Access data and manipulate it just as I would in Access, but I didn't try anything fancy. If you never used Access, you'd have no trouble doing many complicated functions in Base.
   OpenOffice also has Draw, which competes with Microsoft's Visio, to make what are loosely called business graphics, and Math, which does the same thing as the Microsoft Equation Editor. Both worked well in my tests.
   Like Microsoft Office, the parts of OpenOffice are seamlessly integrated, and you never have to guess what to do with documents. Double clicking on them opens them in the appropriate part of the suite. The same spell checker works in all parts of the software, too.
   Windows and Linux users can download and install the OpenOffice suite from the www.openoffice.org site. But my advice to Mac OS X users is to avoid the OS X version listed at the site and choose instead a more modern version called NeoOffice. It's also free. (It's based on OpenOffice but uses native Mac OS X operating-system code.) Get it from http://www.neooffice.org.
   NeoOffice is available in English, French, German, Spanish, Italian and Japanese, in addition to Vietnamese, Norwegian, Czech and Dutch.