OpenOffice.org: An Overview

What is OpenOffice.org?

OpenOffice.org is an open source project which makes available binaries and source code of the OpenOffice.org suite. The project came into being soon after Sun Microsystems released the code to its StarOffice 5.2 suite under a Lesser Gnu Public License. Sun Microsystems now participates as a member of this community.

The aim of the project is to not only provide a community for developers and users to interact, but also to act as an access point for the binaries and source code the community releases.

What are the benefits of OpenOffice.org?

Because everything about OpenOffice.org is geared around being open, the applications which form part of the suite interact and inter operate extremely well with other applications. The suite is very capable of opening files produced by many other office suites, including Microsoft Office.

As a result of OpenOffice.org being open source many people will be able to gain benefit from the fact that they can have specific features added to suit their own needs. This is a problem people have typically had to work around in the past as closed source projects don't often add features based on request.

What applications are available?

Calc

Calc is a spreadsheet similar to Microsoft's Excel. It is capable of opening files produced by Microsoft Excel as well as other spreadsheet programs. It can import from comma separated values .csv or dbase .dbf files. amongst others.

Data in a spreadsheet can be viewed as a graph, filtered or sorted very simply.

Writer

Writer is a word processor similar to Microsoft's Word or Wordperfect. It imports documents from many different formats and is compatible with most word processors in current use.

It has all the usual features one would expect from a word processor, such as spell checking etc, and it has the ability to export to PDF without needing any other software.

Impress

This is the presentation application and is similar in function to applications such as Microsoft's Powerpoint. It has all the features one would expect from a presentation application.

Impress is very easy to use. It is template based, which can save you lots of time doing repetitive work. It comes with many templates as standard. These templates can be edited or simply added to.

Base

Base is the database tool which forms part of the OpenOffice.org suite. Everything you would need to build a database is available here. With it, forms and reports can be built. This makes the data in your database much more accessible to the user.

This tool is similar to Microsoft Access and has the ability to connect to databases such as Mysql or Postgresql using ODBC.

Draw

Draw is a tool used to produce Scalable Vector Graphics. While the application may appear fairly simple at first, it certainly can be used for fairly complex drawings.

Due to the fact that it exports Scalable Vector Graphics .svg files it can be used along side many other drawing applications in current use.

All these applications will be dealt with in more detail in later articles in this series.

Conclusion

OpenOffice.org has a lot to offer and only a very slight learning curve for those familiar with their current office suite. This, together with the fact that it is available free of charge, should make for a very compelling argument to use OpenOffice.org in the future.