News from the OpenOffice front
Alternative for Microsoft
Microsoft Office is beyond doubt the most popular office suite for word processing (Word), spreadsheets (Excel), presentations (PowerPoint), etc. And yet, lots of users and businesses prefer a free alternative such as OpenOffice (http://www.openoffice.org). It takes some time to get acquainted with any new office suite, but then OpenOffice is quite versatile: it allows you to create and edit documents (in Writer), spreadsheets (Calc), presentations (Impress), etc. Moreover, OpenOffice can handle files saved in Microsoft Office relatively well. So the switch to OpenOffice should, in principle, be smooth.
Not used. Admittedly, the options in the OpenOffice modules are a bit more limited than in Microsoft Office, but generally this doesn’t constitute a problem. Indeed, research has shown that 80% of all users use a mere 20% of all the available functions!
Tip. Besides, by installing add-ons (which you can find at http://extensions.services.openoffice.org) you can add a great many extra functions.
New version 3.3
About a year and a half ago, a new release of the program gave OpenOffice a more attractive and neater interface. This is clearly evident when you, for instance, highlight text (in Writer), but also in the charts you create in Calc or the drawings you make in Draw. And now another new version of OpenOffice has been released: 3.3.
New features. We advise upgrading to this new release, be it only because a number of security leaks have been plugged. But there are lots of useful new features in OpenOffice 3.3 too - they are listed at http://www.openoffice.org/dev_docs/features/3.3/index.html.
Here are some examples: better password-protection in Writer and Calc, better support for PDF fonts, a smarter display of decimals in Calc, more options for importing CSV files in Calc, a better slide layout in Impress, a smarter interpretation of data when creating charts in Calc, more options for using capital letters in Writer, coloured tabs in Calc and a more extensive synonyms thesaurus in Writer. In addition, the general print interface has improved as well. The OpenOffice toolbar now contains a search field which lets you find files easily.
New also: LibreOffice
Following the recent takeover of Sun (the owner of OpenOffice) by Oracle, another office suite has become available. Indeed, dissatisfied with Oracle’s open-source policy, some developers have launched LibreOffice (http://www.documentfoundation.org), a suite based on the source code of OpenOffice 3.3.
For the time being, it’s just a clone, but the aim is to develop this office suite independently of OpenOffice. You can download a beta version already, but there’s not much point in doing so for now.
Note. The alternative office suite StarOffice (previously owned by Sun as well) is now in the hands of Oracle too and is called Oracle Open Office (http://www.oracle.com/us/products/applications/open-office/index.html). However, it has remained a subscription program.
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