OpenOffice - a Frugal Office for you

Those of you who follow the Frugal Tech know that we like two things (a) stuff that works (b) a bargain. Pretty much in that order. After-all, if it’s a high tech bargain but doesn’t work then that’s known as a rip-off. We hate those. So we’ve found something that’s BOTH, and we think you’ll like it very much.

The something is Open Office. You can visit their web site at this link here. What is Open Office? Well in their own words:

Open Office.org is a multi-platform and multilingual office suite and an open-source project. Compatible with all other major office suites, the product is free to download, use, and distribute.

Free is good, so that meets our (b) bargain criteria. What about (a) though, does it work? Most of you reading this are using Microsoft Office, AppleWorks, or even Corel Wordperfect Office. All of those are splendid options and help you get your job done. But how does Open Office stand up to those? Well a complete review is a bit out of the scope of this cappucino whipping barrista, still we can comment on a few aspects, the common ones we (and probably you) would use everyday. That is their wordprocessor (known as Writer), their spreadsheet (known as Calc) and their presensation developer (known as Impress). We use OpenOffice on an 1 GHz Intel based system under MS Windows XP with 1GB RAM.

Writer
Writer is pretty much perfect. It’s easy to use, seems to be completely compatible with Word (at least for what the average Jane does) and, best of all, with one “click” you can turn any document into a pdf with it. It’s a pretty good deal in my pocketbook! I found Writer to not lack anything that MS Word had and Writer was just as easy to use. In fact, I just downloaded the software and started it and with no training I was able to use Writer. When pulling Word documents in it’s good about 95% of the time. It seems to have problems with things like the error markup feature in Word. One of the nicest things about Writer is that there are so many formats you can save your work to, including XML. This allows you to easily and quickly post to the web. In fact, I found it to be a nice and simple tool to whip up a web page with. With the International Organization for Standards voting in Open Document Format OASIS as the world wide standard for document interchange (see the ISO press release HERE), Open Office is a perfect tool to adhere to that standard for your documents. MS Word doesn’t currently support that format.

Calc
Calc is another well done piece in the Open Office suite. It calculates everything nicely (as it better had!) thankfully so there’s no worries there. It also handles the flat file database part of using your spreadsheet well too, in terms of sorting and quick finds. Again, for what 90% of the people use a spreadsheet for, Calc is really perfect. As with Writer, there was no learning curve, I just downloaded it and was able to start using it immediately. Calc also supports the Open Document Format OASIS standards. All was not smooth sailing though. When it came to easily copying a wide are of spreadsheet cells to move formula’s around, Calc was not nearly as easy to use as Excel. That became a real frustration in using it. Calc is easily as powerful as Excel, it’s just the they implement that feature that makes it frustrating. Still the price of free can’t be beat for an excellent and full featured tool.

Impress
Impress might be the most interesting of the modules. I say that due to what I experienced one day at work. It appeared I had a version of MS Powerpoint that had some sort of bug in it such that the slides I created could not be read by some of my co-worker’s later versions of Powerpoint. As you can imagine, this caused alot of panic when we all found out during a major crunch to get a presentation out! But OpenOffice’s Impress came to the rescue. With it anyone could open whatever version of Powerpoint anyone had and then edit it. And then, either save it back as Powerpoint that anyone could then read in their later versions of Powerpoint or convert it into .pdf so that anyone anywhere could read it. Lifesaver is a mild word. I’ve found Impress to work a bit differently than PowerPoint, not harder just differently. For example, some pieces are easier, such as with tabs at the top of the area that you do your page layout in, making it simpler to move from what view to another. Powerpoint has these at the bottom and they can get confusing. Charting is also different, as full featured as Powerpoint, but feels sighty easier. As with the other two modules there was virtually no learning curve to get up and running.

So what’s not to like?
Open Office, at least running on a Windows PC, is very good, but there are some areas that I didn’t like. I didn’t like how it appears to be somewhat of a memory hog. When I’m running multiple applications at once - MS Excel, Firefox, IBM Lotus Notes database, IBM Lotus Notes email, Skype, Palm - and then run Open Office it seems that within 30 minutes or so my system will slow down. At first this wasn’t an issue but eventually it got to be a real turnoff. The only thing I can attribute it to is that Open Office, at least under Windows, is a memory hog. Running Open Office under Windows by itself isn’t an issue, it seems to get all the elbow room it needs. The other thing is that Open Office seems to open slowly. We are not talking minutes here, more like 30 seconds or so. That might be the configuration of my system, I don’t know, but it’s something to be aware of. All in all, whether an application opens in 15 second or 30 seconds for the average Jane doing work I’m not sure matters.

Open Office is free, is open source and is backed by Sun Microsystems, Red Hat, Novell, Intel and others and you just have to download it from their site @ http://www.openoffice.org

*Update 07/08/2006*
Microsoft has agreed to support Open Document Format, see Microsoft announcement at this link HERE.