Seven Reasons To Go With OpenOffice.org 2.0

I still remember the early days of Star Office. It wasn't Free Software back then. It has its own "desktop," left nav tree, and file open dialog box that doesn't work quit the way you expected. But it has one thing going for it—it can open Microsoft Word documents.

Sun bought Star Office, made it Free Software with a new name OpenOffice.org, and kept working on it. Yesterday, they released OpenOffice.org 2.0. I grabbed a copy and installed it on my work machine.

I've been forced to use OpenOffice.org at work for a year and a half (OCI won't buy me a copy of MS Office) and it worked out well. I can read, write and print MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint documents just fine.

The 2.0 release prompted me to reflect on the choice between MS Office and OpenOffice.org. And I see a lot of reasons to go with OpenOffice.org. Here's some of them

1. OpenOffice.org 2.0 is Free Software. It won't hurt you to just install it, even if you later also install MS Office
2. OpenOffice.org 2.0 understands more file formats than MS Office. You can open an MS Word document in OpenOffice.org, but you cannot open an OpenOffice.org Writer document in MS Office
3. OpenOffice.org 2.0 works on many platforms: Windows, Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, and more while MS Office only works on two: Windows and Mac
4. OpenOffice.org 2.0 file formats are open and standardized. This ensures the long term viability of documents
5. OpenOffice.org 2.0 generates PDF files from its documents, spreadsheets and presentations for easier sharing
6. OpenOffice.org 2.0 contains a new database module, not unlike MS Access, that is based on the pure Java database engine HSQLDB and allows users to create form based applications and reports based on the data
7. OpenOffice.org 2.0's document format, OpenDocument, itself an industry standard, is being adopted as "standards" by huge organizations, like the U.S. state of Massachusetts. They are already posting *.odt formatted documents on the web

Of course, not everyone can migrate to OpenOffice.org 2.0 right away. Reasons to keep on using MS Office:

1. You are a heavy MS Office user and just don't feel like learning a new thing all over again
2. You are in an environment where MS Office is the standard and it would take five years to change that
3. MS Office formatted document is the end product of your work and the fidelity requirements are high (particular fonts, etc.)
4. You simply like the feeling of paying Microsoft money (or make your employer pay just to highlight your importance)

Responses[6]

Posted by Weiqi Gao on October 21, 2005 9:53:47 PM CDT #