Still, just like I believe there’s somebody for everyone, I believe there is a place in this world for Office apps. Big business, for instance, would come to a screeching halt if the Redmond Gang decided to quit making Office and start making ketchup instead. It’s an unfortunate state of affairs that nearly every industry and government on the planet is so dependent of one company and its product. Worse, it’s a position that many business choose to be in, but defend vigorously with all sorts of half-truths and Big Redmond propaganda about saving money and compatibility.
It’s all bunk, I tell you! Hog wash!
Competition in a free enterprise environment where several healthy players vie for your business is how you save money. And buying products that adhere to a globally agreed to standard for data files is how you maintain compatibility.
The ubiquity of Word, for example, has made .doc files a de facto standard. The problem is that the format is not agreed upon by the public at large or a public standards board, like the International Organization for Standardization( ISO). The format of Word documents is left to whims of one company, Microsoft, and even they can’t stick to a standard.
Why does that make a difference?
Because having an “Open” standard levels the playing field for vendors, stimulates competition, and is ultimately beneficial to vendors and consumers.
Vendors writing to an open standard don’t have to worry so much about clashing file and data types; adhere to the standard and your files and data should be readable and writable by any application that uses the standard. That creates less development cost for vendors.
Consumers benefit because vendors can concentrate of innovation and cost, providing consumers with a array of products that fit every need and budget.
An excellent example of this model can be found in Sun’s StarOffice and OpenOffice suite of office applications.
Sun has managed to transform StarOffice from a grassroots effort to provide cross-platform compatibility with Microsoft’s Office suite, into a product that competes with well against Microsoft’s Office and at a fraction of the price.
Better still, Sun offers a free version of its office app; OpenOffice, and it does pretty much what StarOffice does, which offers a more business friendly support structure.
I’ve been using OpenOffice for a week or so now and I have to say that I like what I see though it’s a bit clunky compared to offerings from Mariner Software, or even Apple’s own iWork office apps (Pages, Numbers, and Keynote).
OpenOffice “Home” screen
A big plus for StarOffice and OpenOffice, at least in my view, is that they both are OpenDocument compatible. OpenDocument is an ISO approved document format standard and StarOffice and OpenOffice read and write these file types natively so there’s no chance of losing vital data through conversion. In fact, both Star and OpenOffice saves documents in the OpenDocument .odx file format. (.odt for OpenDocument Text, .ods for OpenDocument Spreadsheet, and so on) And, of course, both apps read MS Office 2003 and 2007 file types, but what is really handy is that Open Office reads and saves in a wide variety of file types.
Writer is well worth the price
For example; I can save a text document in file types compatible with earlier versions of OpenOffice, Word (back to Word 95!!), and StarWriter, AportisDoc which support text files on the Palm Devices, DocBook which is readable of other gadgets like cellphones, as well as the standard Rich Text and Plain Text formats. This makes OpenOffice a very handy tool in environments where documents can originate anywhere using almost any program.
OpenOffice should be thought of as OfficeBasic. In the early days of OpenOffice developers thought to create an environment in which office applications could be used. By doing do they could make it a single package that could be compiled and run on any capable platform.
Today’s OpenOffice still carries that single-point-of-entry heritage and each office application is a part of the OpenOffice whole. Click on the OpenOffice icon and you are presented with an iconized menu that lets you open create any of the typical office documents; text, presentation, spreadsheet, database, and drawing. There’s also an interesting application called Formula.
Formula lets you write complex mathematical expressions and see the results. I can see this being useful to college students and rocket scientists.
In fact, students or anyone of a budget (and who isn’t these days) could use OpenOffice and be perfectly happy with having never to spend a cent of a Microsoft Office app.
Calc does a mean spreadsheet
Because Open Office is a big app it tends to need more room to run in than some of the more svelte and polished, and costlier cousins, so make sure you’ve got some extra ram to keep things running smoothly.
I think the developers got confused with the naming convention for applications within OpenOffice. Before you enter an application it is called one thing, Formula for example, but once in Fomula, however, it is called Math. Text is called Writer, Spreadsheet is called Calc, Presentation is called Impress and so on. I think the function name of the applications were used to help users decide which app to use for what, but they should let you know that clicking on Text will open Writer and not and application called Text. A minor thing.
You get all of the basic features in each of the sub-apps; Text, called Writer once inside the app, provides all of the necessary formatting and document functions including automatic spell-check, a grammar checker, footers and headers, and the ability to create indexes and tables of content. Spreadsheet, called Calc, support most of the basic Excel functions. The Presentation app, called Impress, gives you standard PowerPoint functions, and so on. You can import and export data between each app.
There are even some useful functions included. For instance, Text/Writer has a mail merging function that lets you create form letters using documents and addresses. Just make sure you import you Mac’s address book first using one of the many templates available.
One thing I miss in OpenOffice is the ability to click on a word and get dictionary meanings. OpenOffice uses it’s own spell checking function instead of using Apple’s. Hopefully future versions will fix this.
I mentioned before that OpenOffice feels clunky. I’m not sure why that is. Maybe it’s because you have to open 2 apps to get anything do (OpenOffice and then the sub-app, like Text/Writer). Maybe it’s because it’s so similar to Microsoft’s large-ish apps. Whatever the reason, OpenOffice does feel like driving a Humvee, but sometimes a Humvee is exactly what you need.
All in all, OpenOffice is a very capable tool and it’s a real steal, literally.
Anyone running on Linux or OS X should grab OpenOffice without question. It’s a solid bit of software.
Business types looking to reduce operating costs might want to look over StarOffice, which provide more features and the ability to purchase service and support from Sun. I’m going to take a look at StarOffice in a future article, so stay tuned.
Using OpenOffice won’t resolve the issue of application overkill, it gives you more application than you may need for a given task, but if you have to drive a Humvee at least now you can do so using really cheap gas.