OpenOffice - a free alternative to Microsoft Office

If you need office programs in a similar wayMs Word, Ms Excel, Ms Access, ..., and do not want to incur financial costs for expensive office applications from Microsoft, then the best alternative for you will be a cross-platform office suite OpenOffice.

OpenOffice Is a free office suite. Having its own history since 2000, OpenOffice enjoys well-deserved popularity, due to its expanded functionality, cross-platform, rich features, good compatibility of components and free license.

OpenOffice will successfully replace you with any other office package, and an open license will free the user from all licensing fees associated with using the package, in the present and in the future.

The composition of OpenOffice

OpenOffice consists of six program components:

Text editor and web page editor Writer;

Spreadsheet Editor Calc;

Tool for creating and demonstrating presentations Impress;

Vector editor Draw;

Database management system Base;

Editor for creating and editing formulas Math.

Details about each component are told on theirspecial pages. All components are integrated into the common core and, thus, have good compatibility with each other. The functionality of all components provides all the necessary tools and allows you to solve the main tasks of the user. To store the results of work, the ODF (ISO / IEC 26300: 2006) file format is used, based on XML and obtained the status of an international standard.

Main Features of OpenOffice

OpenOffice has a number of interesting features, partially or completely absent in other office packages:

Cross-platform. Currently, OpenOffice.org can be used on all popular platforms: Linux (on 32- and 64-bit systems), Windows (2000 and later), MacOS, FreeBSD and Solaris.

Tools that make it easy to create, edit and manage documents:

Gallery for inserting images;

Navigator to navigate through the document and search;

Stylist for creating, editing and managing document formatting styles;

Data sources for importing data from databases or spreadsheets.

Support for MS Office formats. You can easily open and save documents in the formats MS Office 97-2003. It also supports the import of files in the format of Office OpenXML (MS Office 2007).

Export to PDF. Export to this format is supported from all components (except Base). If you have a special extension, you can also import PDF into OpenOffice Draw.

Support for extensions. OpenOffice.org provides the ability to develop independent third-party extensions that provide the end user with additional functionality. Extensions are easily installed and deleted. The community supports the OpenOffice extensions repository.