Office Automation Office Suites Open Office Multi-Platform Office Suite | Open Office Multi-Platform Office Suite |
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Open Office is a multi-platform office suite offering almost all the features of similar commercial software, but free to download and free to use without limitations. Open Office supports a wide range of file formats including those of Microsoft Office. Components Writer is a complete word processing program with advanced styles and formatting functions, a powerful spelling checker, auto-complete and auto-format features. Documents can also be exported in HTML for publication on the web or published in Portable Document Format (.pdf). Calc is a powerful spreadsheet that can be used to easily generate reports and statistics from corporate databases. Spreadsheets can be saved in Microsoft Excel, OpenDocument format or exported as .pdf files. Impress is a tool for creating multimedia presentations. It supports multiple views, many drawing tools, diagrams and effects including 3d images from fonts. Presentations can be saved both in OpenDocument and MS Powerpoint formats. Impress can also generates a Flash (.swf) file from your presentation. Draw is a vector graphics editor you can use to design diagrams and flowcharts. Draw comes with a gallery of ready made graphics you can extend with your own creations. You can choose to save graphics in OpenDocument format, in a widely used graphic format as bmp, png, gif, jpeg, tiff, wmf or export them to Flash files. BASE is a powerful database manager software. It directly supports a number of database engines: HSQL (BASE native database engine), ADO, Microsoft Access, MySQL and many others through ODBC and JDBC drivers. All common database management operations (creating a table, adding, modifying and deleting records, executing database queries) can be performed with the use of intuitive visual tools. BASE also offers a Report Wizard for the creation of reports from data and a Form Wizard a simple database application generator. OpenOffice is supported by a very active community. If you run into any kind of problem with a component of the suite don't hesitate to ask for help in the support forum. The forum is also a great source of tips, tricks and advices. Comments Good Open Source Suite Good for my business I'm a real estate agent and I use OpenOffice for my business. I've noticed some performance problems with certain kind of files, and I see I'm not alone, however they have not seriously affected my productivity. On the other hand I've been favorably impressed by the flexibilty of the OpenDocument format. Interoperability and easy data exchange between different applications are essential features of an office automation suite. I hope that OpenOffice can be furtherly improved, but even in its current version is a good open source business application. |
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After several months of testing I can say I'm fully satisfied. Employees with a good experience in MS Office have encountered very few problems to get used to the new software. We had a large number of spreadsheets created for MS Excel and we've migrated them to Calc with only minor modifications.
The components we use more are Calc and Writer and the only real problem we have noticed is that they are slower than their Microsoft counterparts when loading very large files.
All considered I can recommend OpenOffice as a reliable and useful open source office suite.