Let me preface that everybody has a favorite word processor. There are others out there and I’d be glad to hear about the free ones that work well for you.
OpenOffice is one of the best productivity suites to come around in a long time and here is why. Most people who use an office productivity suite do not use it for anything more than typing up a letter or sometimes calculating in a small spreadsheet. Most people in an office environment who don’t know there are viable and quite usable alternatives use Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel to do these tasks. These programs are horribly overpriced and bloated for simple tasks. I reserve my MS Word and Excel licenses for my power users.
The OpenOffice versions of these programs are Writer and Calc. OpenOffice reads and writes Microsoft formatted documents with ease. When you open an existing document OpenOffice will save in whatever format it was originally. However when you create a new document and you wish to share this document with a Microsoft user, you will need to select “Save As”. In Writer select the save as type “Microsoft Word 97/2000/XP (.doc)” and in Calc select the save as type “Microsoft Excel 97/2000/XP (.xls)”. It is that easy.
Here is a fun tip that Microsoft Office XP can’t do. In OpenOffice File menu select “Export as PDF”. This will create an Adobe PDF file viewable on every platform with a PDF viewer. Most people have this viewer installed already. When you have “Tagged PDF” selected in the export screen your PDF file will also contain the hyperlinks, if any, from your source document. So if your document had a link to go a particular web page, your tagged PDF would also have this link. There are installable print drivers like the doPDF project that allow you to print to a PDF file but these free ones so far do not allow you to keep embedded hyperlinks. PDF files are difficult for most people to edit once they are created because most people only have this PDF viewers installed. This makes them an excellent document format to use for quotes emailed to customers with the added benefit that your customer can view them on nearly any platform.
The significant difference between Word and Writer and Excel and Calc lies in the scripting engines. Spreadsheet formulas are not scripting code. These formulas read just fine between Excel and Calc. Documents that make use of the scripting engines are high level documents that are literally programs in and of themselves. For Microsoft products these types of documents would have Visual Basic code embedded. It is not likely that you will come across these types of documents here.
Finally Microsoft provides viewers for Word and Excel. If you come across Word or Excel documents that just are not viewing or printing correctly then one of these viewers could help you out. The viewers are free. The actual Microsoft Office program to edit the files is what costs so much.
So when somebody here says “I need Excel” or “I need Word” I respond with, “You already have something better installed on your desktop. Look for a folder called OpenOffice.org.
File formats talked about in this article:
.doc - Microsoft Word
.xls - Microsoft Excel
.pdf - Adobe Acrobat
.odt – OpenOffice OpenDocument Text
.sxw – OpenOffice.org 1.0 Text Document
.ods – OpenOffice OpenDocument Spreadsheet
.sxc – OpenOffice.org 1.0 Spreadsheet