Open Source Friday Focus: OpenOffice.org

There is a beyond viable open source alternative to Microsoft Office. The OpenOffice.org product and project recently announced that the battle tested open source productivity suite has been downloaded over 300 million times. In a true testament to how far it has come in becoming a real alternative to MS Office, the latest major release Version 3, has been downloaded over 100 million times in the last year alone!

The OpenOffice.org team has just released version 3.2. I will get into some of the key features in the always free upgrade later on. The big news from my point of view is that this is the first update with the Oracle logo at the bottom of the page. The Oracle stewardship marks another keystone in the 20+ year history of the project and the software.

The original code was developed by a German company, StarDivision. StarDivision was acquired by Sun in 1999. The product was known as Star Office. In 2002 the product was released as OpenOffice.org version 1.0, under an open source LGPL (Lower GPL) license. It really took off with about 50 million downloads.

Version 2.0 of OpenOffice was a seminal release, with much improved support for Microsoft Office formats, a database component and support for the ODF format. Open Document Format (.ODF) was adopted by the ISO in 2006. It has become a standard in its own right. Microsoft has waffled back and forth on whether or not it will support ODF, but due to public pressure now does support ODF. This really signaled that OpenOffice and its native document format really had arrived.

The real key for OpenOffice.org being widely used though was good support for the MS Office formats. With so many .doc and .xls files out there, if OpenOffice did not do a good job reading and editing these files, there would not be a migration path from MS Office. Plus the MS formats were the de facto standard.

Version 3.0 which has seen 100 million downloads in a year put a lot more polish on the product. At this point, available in over 70 languages, OpenOffice.org is every bit a worthy competitor to the MS Office suite. In addition to Sun/Oracle, major contributors are IBM, Red Hat, Novell, Google (surprised?)and Beijing Redflag CH2000. Oracle has said they remain committed to the project. There is no reason to doubt them. An alternative to the Microsoft suite probably tickles Larry Ellison’s fancy pretty well.

Today’s OpenOffice.org suite has 6 main components. There are literally 100’s of extensions available (most also open source)that allow for a wide range of added functionality. All the components are integrated into the one suite. Much more so than in MS Office.

The basic suite has this:

Writer – this is the word processor. It has become a very intuitive full featured product. If you hate the ribbon menus in Word, you will appreciate Writer. But it is a powerful program. There are very few word processing tasks that you could not accomplish with this great component. There are also lots of extensions that give Writer a little bit extra pizazz in dealing with graphics, text manipulation and lay out.

Calc – this is the spreadsheet component of the suite. In my experience, this was the weak link in the suite. Frankly it was just not anywhere near as good as Excel. But the Calc component has made great strides. Today’s version 3.2 actually has a dozen new or enhanced features in Calc alone. One thing I like about Calc is the separate Chart program. Chart gives you a ton of options to graphically depict the data in your Calc spreadsheet (or data from any OpenOffice.org application). Today’s Calc has come a long way. If you are a serious spreadsheet cruncher, you should find Calc up to your needs.

Impress – a Power Point analogue. In many ways I like this component better than PP itself. Lots of options and cool features to jazz up your presentations. Also lots of options around playing the slide show. My only complaint is that sometimes it gave you even too many choices. You could go down the rats nest tweaking stuff. Most users who don’t like pushing every button won’t be bothered with that though.

Base – added in version 2.0. this is the database component of the suite. An Acces clone, I have not used it a lot (I don’t use Access a lot either). From what I have seen though it is not as slick as Access, but seems to give you similar features and tasks.

Draw– this component is sometimes my favorite and sometimes the most frustrating component in the suite. It is sort of a combination of Publisher and a drawing program, with a little Visio thrown in. I love playing with graphics, so I enjoy that part of it. But at the end of the day, it is not a Publisher or Visio replacement and if you want a graphics program, there are better stand alone choices. Nevertheless, you can do some cool things in Draw. If you are like me, you will find yourself experimenting with it for various tasks.

Math – perhaps the least understood and used of the OpenOffice.org components, Math is a formula editor. I don’t do any formula editing, so don’t have a lot to say on this one.

Version 3.2 is also snappier in loading faster. It has greater compatibility and a host of other improvements. But the real world endorsement from me comes from this: Our home desktop that my wife and two young sons (10 and 8) use came with MS Works. I installed OpenOffice.org version 2 a while back. They have been using OpenOffice.org ever since. They never had any compatibility issues with files and accomplished all of the tasks they needed. Now granted your work environment may be more demanding, but if it works for them, it will work for you.

If you are not already locked into another office productivity suite, OpenOffice.org is a great choice even if it wasn’t free. But for free, you really need to consider why you wouldn’t use it!

I have included a nice YouTube that shows you some of the apps in action. Enjoy.