Introduction To Open Office

Open Office (www.openoffice.org) is an open source office automation suite now grown to the point to be considered one of the main competitors of MS Office.

Open Office includes the key desktop applications you can find in other similar software packages: a spreadsheet, a word processing application, a software to create multimedia presentations, a drawing application and a database manager.

The word processor: Writer

This software offers almost all the features offered by MS Word. You can open and work with MS Word and Wordperfect files or create HTML and PDF documents.

With document templates you can easily create standardized documents (such as business letters or faxes) while the Stylist panel allows you to change the style of a paragraph heading, a table or any other element within your whole document with a single operation.

The spreadsheet: Calc

Users with some familiarity with Microsoft Excel will easily learn Calc as it offers a similar user interface and even the model used for formulas is almost the same. This also greatly facilitates the migration of sheets created for the popular Microsoft application.
Calc offers advanced cell formatting functions and reusable data sheet styles with templates.
Another important feature is the capability to extract informations from corporate databases and use them to feed a spreadsheet for further presentation or analysis of 'what if' scenarios.

The presentation manager: Impress

This application offers all the typical features of any presentation manager: you can format text using multiple fonts, colors and styles with an integrated text editor, add clip arts and other graphic images to your presentations with an image manager and finally determine the displaying order and transition effects of the various slides your presentation is made of.

Impress can produce MS Powerpoint files. In addition presentations can be exported in various other formats including PDF, SWF (Flash) files, XHTML and many graphic file formats. The HTML Export wizard will make easier publishing your presentations on the Web.

The drawing program: Draw

A fully featured vector graphics editor capable to create complex flowcharts, diagrams and organisation charts.

Creating diagram is really simple with the use of Smart connectors. You can assign a connector to a graphic object and when you move the object the connector will follow it.

Draw includes a complete gallery of ready made graphics and cliparts and you have the possibility to add your own work to the gallery.

Graphics created with Draw can be saved in OpenDocument format and exported in all the most common formats (png, bmp, jpeg, gif, tiff, wmf) and Flash files.

The database manager: Base

With BASE you can create and manage databases built not only with HSQL, the BASE native database engine, but also with external engines such as Microsoft Access and MySQL both natively supported. Other database engines can be utilized through JDBC and ODBC drivers.

Simple visual tools help even inexperienced users easily perform the typical database management operations: creating tables and indexes, adding, modifying and deleting records, creating and executing SQL queries.

BASE includes the Report Wizard and the Form Wizard, useful tools to generate reports from data and easily create simple database based applications.

License

Open Office is distributed under the terms of the GNU GPL (General Public Licence), no licensing fees need to be paid whether you utilize the suite for personal or business use.

Users of commercial office automation suites who are considering to migrate to Open Office will be able to extensively test a fully functional version of any Open Office component before taking a definitive decision.

Open Office is constantly developed and supported by an active community of users. The quality of the online documentation is very good and in the support forum you will always find experienced users willing to help you with any problem you may encounter using this software.

If you are looking to enhance your personal or company's productivity and desire a low cost alternative to commercial software this is a product that should be taken in serious consideration.