OpenOffice.org Making Microsoft's Office Team Even More Nervous Eric Grevstad
It's hard not to feel a little smug. We're looking at a crisp, colorful Adobe Acrobat PDF document, created from one of the PowerPoint templates on the Microsoft Office Template Gallery site. But we didn't use the $399 Office to open and edit the template, nor to create the PDF (despite PDF's popularity, neither today's Office XP nor tomorrow's Office 2003 can save or export Acrobat files). We used the latest release of the Microsoft-file-compatible, cross-platform, open-source OpenOffice.org suite. We paid $0.
As we wrote in our May 2002 review of version 1.0, OpenOffice.org is the most formidable challenge to Microsoft's desktop-productivity headlock, even more than Corel's excellent WordPerfect Office. OpenOffice is a word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, and drawing quartet that offers impressive (if not quite perfect) loading, saving, and sharing of files with colleagues using Word, Excel, and PowerPoint; a tolerably short transition or learning curve for Office converts; and availability of Windows, Linux, and Mac OS versions, all free to distribute and free for programmers to poke around with the source code, as long as they pass along any improvements to the global OpenOffice.org community.
The first batch of said improvements is on display now in OpenOffice.org 1.1.x (v1.1 is the latest official release, with a third release candidate for v1.1.2 available as well). They range from the abovementioned PDF export capability to quicker loading, a macro recorder, and assorted Office compatibility enhancements, and they make OpenOffice.org an even higher-priority download (65 MB) for anyone considering or budgeting a Microsoft Office upgrade.
