Open Office is a full-fledged office suite of applications which rivals Microsoft Office in its capabilities. Furthermore Open Office is entirely open source, which means that it's free to download, use, and re-distribute. Open Office is a great alternative for those who don't want to fork over several hundred dollars on MS Office. It's also a great choice for students going off to university. When you consider that students can purchase a capable netbook or small laptop computer for $300 to $550, it's hard to justify having to spend $150 more on MicrosoftOffice, Home and Student.
Open Office includes similar components to the core of MS Office, including:
- Word Processor
- Spreadsheet
- Presentation Software
- Drawing package
Open Office users can choose to save files in MS Office formats (Word, Excel, & PowerPoint) or they can save them in Open Office's native formats. Either way, students and teachers will be able to bring those files to school and continue to work with them there. All school computers within the Chinook School Division have Open Office installed by default. As well, Open Office applications can open files created with the common MS Office applications (again, Word, Excel, & PowerPoint).
Those familiar with Microsoft Office shouldn't have a huge struggle adapting to Open Office, although the interfaces do differ in a number of ways. For example, Open Office places page formatting under the Format menu, which is more logical than Microsoft's mysterious choice of having it in the File menu. Realistically, seasoned users of older versions of MS Office (2000, XP, 2003) will probably make the switch to Open Office just as easily as adapting to the significantly overhauled interface of MS Office 2007.
One final advantage of Open Office is that it's cross-platform, offering versions for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux, and Unix.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment