OpenOffice.org

Counting back, I realized recently that I've been using OpenOffice.org (to give the suite its Sunday name) for seven years. It was at version 1 point something when I started with it. It's now at 3.1 and runs cross-platform - there are versions for Windows, Linux (in 5 flavours) and Mac OS. There are even two versions for Sun's Solaris operating system (a version for each chip architecture). On the download site, I counted availability in 30 languages.

So why have so few people in North America heard of OpenOffice? Is it the mistrust of something that's free (and very good, by the way) or is it Microsoft's hegemony that causes people to think "Word" means word processing and "Excel" means spreadsheets? Whatever the reason, OpenOffice is a solid and very functional replacement for Microsoft Office. It does have its gaps - the most obvious being the lack of email and calendaring client, a role filled by the unwieldy Outlook in the Microsoft suite. There are alternatives available that can be used alongside OpenOffice - Thunderbird (with Lightning for calendaring) from the Mozilla Foundation being the most prominent. Thunderbird runs on Linux and Mac OS as well as Windows, while native Linux clients like Evolution and KMail and Apple Mail and iCal on Mac OS provide alternatives for those platforms.

OpenOffice, apart from the lack of email component, is a fully featured suite - as well as Writer and Calc, Impress is a solid presentation application, while Base can be combined with back-end databases like MySQL to provide functionality similar to Access. That said, one of the key features when considering interoperability of files is the ability to read (and write) in Microsoft file formats. Writer has got better at this over time, while I find Calc and Impress lack some functionality in this area.

The file format used by OpenOffice is called ODF - Open Document Format. This format is an international standard (ISO 26300) for document interoperability, which means that documents stored in this format wil be accessible in the future as the file format will not change from version to version as has happened with proprietary file formats in the past, thus making them challenging to read if the format is no longer supported by a more recent version of the software used to create the file.

Bottom line - if you're tired of paying hundreds of dollars for your office productivity software, give OpenOffice.org a try.