OpenOffice is a powerful Open Source office suite.
This suite was originally launched under the name of StarOffice and it was produced by StarDivision. Since 1999, Sun Microsystems are the ones who take care of this project. The power of this suite resides from the great portability because it was written in C++ and the fact that it's cost free.
The main tools of this suite are: Writer, Impress, Math, Draw, Calc and Base. If you would look at the main competitor, Microsoft Office, you can easily see the similarities because this is an active response against MS Office on the software market.
'Writer' is the main application of this suite and basically this is the tool that has the possibility to write the documents. As a bonus, beside the usual functionality for a program like this, you can get the support for exporting files as PDF documents.
'Impress' is the application that does presentations. It has less features than its main competitor, PowerPoint, but it's a decent alternative.
'Math' is the program that does the mathematical function creation. If you need this kind of functionality, this is the right tool.
'Draw' is a vector drawing tool. This is a sophisticated tool that can be used in order to satisfy your needs for this kind of drawing. It can import picture formats like: BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, TIFF and WMF. It has the support for creation of SWF versions of your projects.
'Calc' is the application that can successfully replace most of the Excel's functionality. This is the tool that creates spreadsheets and all the related activities.
'Base' can be used for the databases so, it is an alternative for Microsoft's solution, Access. It includes a full version of the HSQL engine and it stores data in XML files. It can access bBASE files for simple database work activities. It has also the support for Adabas D, ADO, Microsoft Access and MySQL.
Pluses: it is a free and strong alternative for Microsoft Office.
Drawbacks / flaws: it uses the X11 windowing system and it has a slow startup behavior.
In conclusion: if you have the need to reduce the costs, this tool is a good alternative because it's free and at the same time a decent alternative to all the commercial solutions. A good alternative is
NeoOffice, which is a OS X native application which uses a Java wrapper in order to provide you the power of OpenOffice. NeoOffice works and looks better on your Mac because it doesn't use the X11 windowing system.
version reviewed: 2.0.4
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