Free your data
Free your data
OpenOffice.org ® is a complete open-source office suite: a functional alternative to Microsoft Office that anyone can download at zero cost. You can use OOo to do word-processing documents, spreadsheets, presentations, math equations, databases, and Websites. You can run it cross-platform on Windows, Linux, and Mac, and there are versions for dozens of languages besides English. Wikipedia's OOo article includes history of the suite, issues, and more references.
OOo can open, create, edit, and save documents in Microsoft Office file formats.¹ You can easily edit the same document files using Office at work and OOo at home, on a USB flash drive or other portable media, if your organization is small enough for its security rules to permit that, or using secure remote access.
OOo has its own default OpenDocument formats, an open standard not under the control of any manipulative corporation, and internationally recognized as ISO 26300. There's a table on my OpenDocument page that compares the OOo modules and their native file formats with those of Microsoft Office. Service Pack 2 for Office 2007 and Office 14 (to come in 2010) both offer native OpenDocument support, although there are problems with the ODF support in Office 2007 SP2. There are third-party add-ons to let Microsoft Office 2000, XP, 2003, and 2007 SP1 work interoperably with OpenDocument files. So users with either office suite should be able to work with both proprietary Microsoft Office file formats and OpenDocument file formats.
OOo had its beginnings in the code base of an office suite called StarOffice, which was purchased in 1999 from its European developers by Sun Microsystems, and then made available free of charge. In 2000 it was used as the starting point for the OpenOffice.org project for ongoing open-source development of a free office suite. Sun was acquired in January 2010 by Oracle. According to a NY Times technology blog post, Oracle intends to push OOo more aggressively than Sun did, including a cloud-based version called Oracle Cloud Office.
| Major releases | |
|---|---|
| OOo 1.x May 2002 |
Default formats: OOo native XML-based (SXW, SXC, SXI) Can handle documents in Microsoft Office formats (DOC, XLS, PPT) Can be used cross-platform on Windows, Linux, and Mac |
| OOo 2.x Oct 2005 |
New default formats:
OpenDocument ISO 26300 XML-based (ODT, ODS, ODP) Still fully supports Microsoft Office and OOo 1.x formats Lots of new features, rough functional parity with Microsoft Office |
| OOo 3.x Oct 2008 |
Full Mac OS X Aqua support OpenDocument 1.2 support Can open Office 2007 documents |
OpenOffice.org is not a clone of Microsoft Office. You can accomplish nearly all the same things, but the procedures will be different in detail. That's why they call it transition. You may even find you like OOo better, if you don't give up the first time something is different. For the Word-to-Writer transition there's a PDF table-format howto guide available that compares menu paths for 90 word-processing tasks. For OOo in general there's context-sensitive Help, two different series of PDF User Guides, and more howto guides and other docs.
In Microsoft Office 2007's Fluent/Ribbon interface they have rearranged everything in the menus. Fun, huh? It may actually be easier for you to transition from whatever MS Office version you have now to OOo than to Office 2007, or Office 14 in 2010. Not to mention the opportunity for individuals and organizations to switch from Microsoft's prices and mutating licensing terms to open-source freeware. OOo 2+ is probably closest interface-wise to Office 2000.² There's a table summarizing Office versions 97 through 2010 on my top Excel page.
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