Multiplatform and multilingual office suite and an open-source project.
Compatible with all other major office suites, the product is free to download, use, and distribute.
Openoffice.org is an excellent Open Source office suite which is actively developed by a large community of volunteers as well as Sun microsystems as a base for their own Star Office suite, it consists of
- A Word processor called Writer
- A Spreadsheet called Calc
- A Presentation program called Impress
- A Diagram and Drawing module called Draw
- An Equation editor called Math
- And a Relational database called Base
These modules come together to form one of the most comprehensive Office suites available today. OpenOffice.org makes use of the Open Document Format(ODF) to ensure future availability of documents, because ODF is an Open Standard (ISO26300) it is fully documented, ODF, unlike Microsoft office formats, was created with data accessibility in mind, where the MS office formats are designed to restrict your freedom, ODF is designed to allow you to access you documents and data in whatever manner you wish.
ODF doesn't mean that OpenOffice.org isn't compatible with other suites, OpenOffice.org is quite capable of loading and saving files created by MS Excel, Word and Powerpoint as well as a wide array of other legacy file formats.
The most popular feature is of course the Price tag, OpenOffice.org is completely Free, not only can you Download the full suite for free from their website but, should you want to, the license terms permit you to download and modify the source code under the terms of the GNU LGPL, while this may sound very complicated and technical but the long and short of it is that no one can take away your rights to use this software.
To download OpenOffice.org visit http://www.openoffice.org and click the Get openoffice.org link.
There's no reason not to give OO.o a try, the windows installer makes it very simple to uninstall OpenOffice if you feel that it's not what you're after.
Minimum system requirements for OO.o 3.1 are outlined below:
- Windows version requires: Windows 98SE, Windows ME, Windows 2000 (Service Pack 2 or higher), Windows XP, Windows 2003,Vista.
- Linux Version requires: kernel version 2.4 or higher, glibc2 version 2.3.2 or higher
- 256 MB RAM
- 400 MB at least of available disk space
- 1024 x 768 or higher resolution with at least 256 colours
*This is just a guide, the software may run acceptably on lesser systems
