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Spencer Smith
Microcomputer Support Specialist
spencera@uoregon.edu
Microsoft Office has been the de facto standard for word processing, spreadsheets, and business presentations for many years. Because of the pervasive use of the Microsoft suite of programs, many students and faculty purchased that suite by default. If your needs are simple, though, there may be an alternative: OpenOffice.
In collaboration with the open source community, Sun Microsystems has developed a productivity suite that is compatible with the Microsoft Office suite. OpenOffice (http://www.openoffice.org/) is freely available for download from the Internet. It incorporates most of the functionality of the Microsoft suite and is compatible with the file formats that Microsoft's products produce.
I need to stress the "most" in "most of the functionality." OpenOffice's Writer module will open Microsoft Word documents and will save out in Microsoft .doc format (as well as Office 2003 .xml format.) However, document revision tracking, advanced document linking, and some other advanced functionality is lacking in OpenOffice Writer. It's a good basic word processor, without many of the frills and fillips that Microsoft has incorporated into Word.
The OpenOffice spreadsheet module, Calc, has similar benefits and limitations. It has all the basic functions and formulas available, and offers various printing and display formats for the finished product. Calc is also compatible with its Microsoft analog, Excel, and will open and save as Excel documents. Some of the more advanced features of Excel (for instance, changing the color of the tab at the top of a column) are missing or obscured in Calc. But the basic functionality is there, and Calc is as easy to use and learn as Excel.
All of the other modules have the same pretty-close-to-Microsoft feel to them. Impress, the presentation module, has the standard set of text, drawing, and media-import tools available. Draw is a basic vector-based* drawing program, similar to (but more limited than) Adobe Illustrator. The Base module implements a fundamental database, with tables, forms, queries and reports similar to Access. The Math module has mechanisms for creating and displaying complex mathematical formulas.
All the modules are relatively clean, with a clear, easy-to-understand interface. With a little patience and willingness to explore, a new user can be up and running in a very short time. People with years of experience in Microsoft's products may be frustrated by the subtle differences between the two offerings, but they should be able to bang out a paper or format a simple spreadsheet without any significant problems.
To give you an idea of the interface, a couple of sample OpenOffice windows are shown in Figures 1 and 2 below.
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Fig. 1: Sample OpenOffice Impress (presentation module) window.
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Fig. 2: Sample OpenOffice Writer (word processor module) window.
For the Macintosh, the analogous product suite (based on the same code and with the same limitations) is NeoOffice/J (http://www.neooffice.org/). There is usually some lag time between a feature in OpenOffice making its way into NeoOffice/J for the Mac; however, NeoOffice/J does a pretty good job of filling the need for a good, free productivity suite on the Mac. NeoOffice/J lacks a database module, much like the analogous Macintosh Office suite from Microsoft; otherwise, OpenOffice and NeoOffice/J are essentially the same.
Open Source Caveats. The drawbacks to using OpenOffice or NeoOffice/J revolve around their nature as open source projects. They come with no warranty whatsoever, and although the documentation available through the 'Help' menu is pretty good, there is no '800' number to call for support. Online searches through Google or newsgroups may yield more results, but problems are mainly left as an exercise for the end user.
OpenOffice is a freely available and fast productivity suite. But if you need the warranty, support, and full application compliance, you may prefer to pay for the full Microsoft product instead.
For the convenience of UO users, Microcomputer Services has made OpenOffice available on its public domain servers (see http://micro.uoregon.edu/pd/ for details on how to access these servers).
If you're affiliated with a UO department and prefer to purchase the Microsoft Office Suite for campus use, please see the website for The Organization for Educational Technology and Curriculum (OETC) at http://www.oetc.org/
* A vector-based graphics program creates forms and shapes by calculating the outline, fill, and curve characteristics mathematically, composing all the resulting shapes and forms into a series of equations that describe the scene. In contrast, a bitmapped graphics program treats each individual point or pixel on the screen discretely, manipulating the color values of each point individually.