Featured Product: OpenOffice.org: An Open Alternative to Off-the-Shelf
Open standards offer software users the opportunity to literally think
outside the box—the box that holds commercial software disks, that is.
The open-standards philosophy relies on the free dissemination of applications,
code sharing, and a community of users who continuously contribute to
improving the product.
OpenOffice.org is an open source office suite that features the same
productivity tools as StarOffice and Microsoft Office. OpenOffice.org
has a spreadsheet application, word processing, presentation manager,
and drawing program. The user interface and feature set are remarkably
similar to StarOffice and MS Office, although OpenOffice.org is not a
duplicate of either. Some features vary among the three. The source code
for OpenOffice.org comes from Sun, which owns StarOffice. OpenOffice.org
runs stably and natively on Solaris, Linux (including PPC Linux), and
Windows. Additional ports, such as FreeBSD, IRIX, and Mac OS X, are in
various stages of completion, with the Mac OS X port likely to be available
in a "complete" form early in 2003.
Users can print in PDF and other formats and save their work in various
file formats. OpenOffice.org also has a working spell check function and
online help. There are most of the same features as commercial products.
OpenOffice.org works transparently with a variety of file formats, including
Microsoft. However, it d'es not support the use of macros from legacy
programs.
OpenOffice.org is free to any user who cares to download it from www.openoffice.org.
However, at the moment it d'es not come with a manual, and there is no
technical support available. For that reason, OpenOffice.org may be best
used by those already familiar with similar office productivity suites,
or those who enjoy working with open-source products that they can shape
to their own purposes.
According to Josh Berkus, volunteer project lead for OpenOffice.org,
third-party OpenOffice.org handbooks will be available within the next
few months. "There are already ‘quick reference sheets,'" says Berkus,
which can be viewed at www.cluesheets.com. Also, developers have written
online tutorials (see http://documentation.openoffice.org, www.ooodocs.
org, and www.digitaldistribution.com).
Jerry Feldman, a software engineer at Hewlett-Packard Co. and a part-time
Linux instructor at Northeastern University, said OpenOffice.org loads
faster than StarOffice, which he has also used. Feldman uses OpenOffice.org
for his in-class presentations. "The fonts are easier to manage in OpenOffice.org,"
he says. What's more, OpenOffice.org features have "saved me time and
make my presentations easier to compose."
The only aspect Feldman misses about StarOffice 5.2 is its capacity to
display two presentations side by side simultaneously. OpenOffice.org
uses separate windows. But Feldman would not sacrifice OpenOffice.org's
other features in order to get that back.
OpenOffice.org is best thought of as both a product and a project, or
perhaps a process. As with other open-standards products, this one is
in a constant state of development, offering a high level of functionality
even as it is being improved upon by dedicated users and fans. Louis Suarez-Potts,
a community manager for OpenOffice.org, says one can best compare open-source
software to commercial software by thinking of the differences between
a movie and a still picture: Open-source software is dynamic, and what
you see is changing all the time.
Commercial packages, with their dependable, stable code, are static.
OpenOffice.org, says Suarez-Potts, appeals to three types of users. "There
are users who are simply looking for free software that is easy and fast
to download," he says. That certainly defines OpenOffice.org: "But another
sort of user likes the idea of passing the software along from friend
to friend, as part of a community of users in defiance of the larger software
industry." The third category, those who are looking for software they
can customize, represents a large number of OpenOffice.org's users.
Suarez-Potts, who is also a consultant and part of the team of paid and
volunteer marketers for OpenOffice.org, thinks that both aspects have
enticed new users to the suite. He points out that the software is truly
international, already available in 27 languages with more in development.
"It's an ideal product for parts of the world where commercial software
is too expensive," he says. What's more, because the file format for OpenOffice.org
is XML, interoperability is easy. It is accessible and adaptable by anyone.
XML file format also incorporates zip compression, so that files saved
in it can be made 25 percent to 60 percent smaller. XML support also allows
users to save files to PDAs and other portable devices.
For more information about OpenOffice.org, visit www.openoffice.org.