OpenOffice Vs Microsoft Office

Why cough up hundreds for Microsoft Office™ when there’s a credible alternative for free?

I am writing this blog post on a new laptop PC that I’ve had for a couple of months now. It came preloaded with a trial copy of Microsoft’s omnipotent 2007 Office™ suite of business applications which includes the likes of Word™, Excel™ and PowerPoint™ etc.

Great I thought! After all, like millions of others; MS Office is my staple office application when it comes to word processing and spreadsheet work. I’ve used it for years and have the 2003 version installed on the 3 other PCs I have in my business.

However, last week, the trial approached its end and the pressure mounted to reactivate the product by purchasing an appropriate license.

So I was faced with a choice; do I spend several hundred quid on the current 2007 version, which according to Amazon, starts at a smidgen under £300 for the small business edition. Or do I simply install another copy of Office 2003 for which I have several User licenses for?

Decision, Decisions…

A couple of my associates use Sun Microsystem’s OpenOffice as their business software suite of choice as an alternative to Microsoft’s Office. I’ve known about the product for years, so I decided to take the opportunity and follow their lead by downloading and using the application.

So there you have it. Decision made, whereupon I duly uninstalled Office and downloaded and ran, the 148Mb file needed for the installation of OpenOffice which is currently on version 3.1.

Thank goodness for broadband that’s all I can say!

First Impressions

OpenOffice Dashbaoard

When OpenOffice first launches on your screen you’re faced with a dashboard which asks you to choose which application you want to use. The main ones may be described as:

• “Write” – word processing app equivalent to MS Word
• “Calc” – spreadsheet app equivalent to MS Excel
• “Impress” – presentation app equivalent to MS PowerPoint
• “Base” – database app equivalent to MS Access

There’s no email client included in OpenOffice whereas MS Office has Outlook™. So during the download process Sun recommends using the freely available Mozilla Thunderbird if an email client is required. Thunderbird is made by the same people who produce the Firefox web browser and is a powerful email client so is worth investigating particularly as it’s free whereas Outlook as a stand alone software purchase, is £115.

Templates and Extensions

Along with the program list on the main OpenOffice screen, you’ll see icons for Templates and Extensions.

Templates are quite similar to the templates you get in MS Office; they are preformatted layouts and designs for various file types including everything from a basic CV outline in Write to advanced budget calculators in Calc. New templates may be downloaded directly into OpenOffice from their website at OpenOffice.org

For people who are used to the extensions in the Firefox browser, OpenOffice extensions will seem very familiar. Extensions are software components that add supplementary functionality to OpenOffice programs.

For example, OpenOffice features out-of-the-box export capability (unlike MS Office), but Write can’t natively import and edit PDF documents. No problem, there’s an Extension for that, which allows you to perform line-by-line edits of PDF files from OpenOffice’s Write.

Getting Stuck In

Once inside OpenOffice I found the interface look and feel, to be very similar to that of the MS Office 2003 version I’ve been using for a while. So the transition was straight forward. However for those used to MS Office 2007 with it’s annoying Ribbon menu bar, you’ll feel you’ve taken a step backwards somewhat. But don’t be put off.

One of the great things about OpenOffice is its ability to open any MS Office file including Office 2007’s .docx Word documents.

So if anyone sends you a MS Office document but you don’t have the suite on your machine. You can still open and edit them regardless without minimal loss of formatting although I noted it didn’t seem to like MS Word macros sometimes.

Conclusion

So having used OpenOffice for the best part of a week in place of MS Office (well certainly on this new laptop anyway), would I recommend it as a credible alternative to MS Office for the budget conscious business owner?

The answer is a clear and resounding “yes”!

Pros

• It’s free and can be supplemented with loads of free add-ons (Extensions) and templates.
• Looks and works like MS Office including the same keyboard shortcuts.
• Will open MS Office documents

Cons

• It doesn’t like MS Word macros
• No email client included
• It’s a big file to download (a problem if you have a slow internet connection)

Download OpenOffice from here.