What’s in a name?First, there was Word, then OpenOffice . . . but not exactly. I just found out that the open-source office software suite installed in my PC has a formal name OpenOffice.org and OpenOffice is actually a trademark of a different company somewhere in Europe.
It’s free!
OpenOffice (I prefer this name) is an office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics and more. If Microsoft has Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Visio, then OpenOffice has Writer, Calc, Impress, and Draw, respectively, and best of all, it’s free.
Consider OpenOffice Writer
Writer is the word processor component of the OpenOffice suite and it has similar functionality to Microsoft Word. I have been using OpenOffice Writer for quite a while and it’s probably the frequently used program in my PC; together with the math editor Math, and vector graphics editor Draw. Most amazing is that, a document written in Writer can be converted (exported) to PDF format effortlessly—I didn’t expect this feature embedded in a free software.
In addition, Writer can save my work as a .doc file (Word 2003) and can open (version 3.0) both .doc and .docx files (Word 2007).
Navigating Writer is not difficult, it feels like using Microsoft Word. There was one instance though that I got lost finding Page Setup in the File menu; page formatting is located at the Format menu in Writer. Since then, I never fail to ask OpenOffice.org Forum for help every time I run into a problem.
OpenOffice is probably one of the best free downloads available on the Internet. This amounts to great savings compared to buying the Microsoft Office Suite software.
The latest version of OpenOffice is OpenOffice.org 3.1.
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