Free Your Office! OpenOffice.org 2.0 Rivals Microsoft, Saves Arms and Legs

by Trevor Bauknight

Published on this site: May 11th, 2005 - See more articles from this month...

A couple of weeks ago, I asked aloud about the possibility of Microsoft's shifts in strategy to meet the demands of new challenges to its hegemony in the world of PC software ("A New Culture At Microsoft? Only Time Will Tell" -
http://www.cafeid.com/art-newms.shtml). A threat I didn't mention looms on the horizon for Microsoft, however; and this one -- the OpenOffice.org community's impending release of version 2 of its office suite -- seems destined to strike at the heart of Redmond's dominance in the business world, the captive audience of Office users the world over who rely on Word, Excel and PowerPoint to make a living. OpenOffice.org 2.0 is in beta testing, and it looks like a formidable opponent indeed, and one that won't cost you a cent to deploy throughout your business (a move we heartily recommend).

A recent BBC News article ("The assault on software giant Microsoft" -
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/..../business/4508897.stm) takes a look at the challenges facing Microsoft and leaves speculation about Microsoft's possible responses to those challenges for the second of two reports, due out this week. The Beeb mentions threats from the GNU/Linux community, which continues to build a fantastic free operating system to loosen Redmond's grip on the desktop. It states that Microsoft's biggest worry should be the excellent Firefox browser
from the Mozilla Organization, a free and worthy alternative to IE (Bill Gates dismisses it as "...just another browser"). It mentions Apple's excellence in innovation, especially with regard to multimedia and even mentions Skype, the Luxembourg-based group that stands poised to dominate (in a peace, love and understanding kind of way, it appears) Voice-over-IP (VoIP).

The article gives short shrift to OpenOffice.org, however; and we find that surprising. You can safely bet that the suite is on Microsoft's radar, though. As for responses, there's little that Microsoft can do about this one, short of taking its file formats and going home or insisting that its $400 office suite is now "part of the OS". That doesn't exactly square with what I hope will be the adoption of a new culture of genuine competition at Microsoft, so it will be interesting to see how Gates & Co. meet this particular challenge.

Does OpenOffice.org Have What It Takes?

OpenOffice.org grew out of Sun Microsystems' (one of Microsoft's most bitter rivals) purchase of StarOffice in 1999 and subsequent release of much of that code to the Open Source Software community (the other of the bitter rivals). The first release of OpenOffice.org in 2002 lacked polish and had some glaring shortcomings, but it was good enough for such an ambitious project to warrant a good deal of positive press and, more importantly, interest and excitement from the wider Open Source community of developers.

As a result, the most recent release of an OpenOffice.org 2.0 beta version shows a remarkable amount of progress and the 2.0 release promises to open up another full-on assault on Redmond in Microsoft's ongoing war against free software.

OpenOffice.org consists of six major components, all worthy counterparts to the components of MS Office: Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw, Base and Math. Writer is an excellent replacement for Word that lacks few features the behemoth word-processing package has. Writer opens Word and WordPerfect documents and has the ability to export PDF and HTML files directly. We find the PDF export feature invaluable here at Cafe ID (http://www.cafeid.com) where we keep our Users Manual in OpenOffice.org format.

Those tasked with maintaining that kind of technical documentation intended for more than one medium will rejoice in the fact that the OpenOffice.org open file format can be unzipped to directly reveal its constituent XML and binary parts, opening up the possibility of creating and using a wide-variety of third-party tools to work with the same data. The Navigator panel makes working with long documents a breeze, and the Stylist panel makes applying font and page styles work similarly to the way Cascading Style Sheets work, allowing you to change the size of all your chapter headings with one small change, for example.

Calc opens Excel files flawlessly and now features the ability to create much larger spreadsheets than did the 1.1 release of OpenOffice.org. It also adheres very closely to the Excel model for formulas, unlike Lotus 123 and other competitors. The Impress program is analogous to PowerPoint, and both it and Draw, OpenOffice.org's vector graphics editor, can output Flash (.swf) files (offering similar capability to Macromedia's Breeze and CorelDRAW, respectively).

The newest component of OpenOffice.org is Base, a database program meant to be an answer to Access. Base includes an SQL engine called HSQL which also stores information in XML files, and it can also access most popular databases (including the ever-popular MySQL) directly and any industry-standard database through the ODBC and JDBC drivers. Math is a full-featured mathematical equation editor that can produce output for the other components.

The open file format and cross-platform code base (OpenOffice.org runs on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris and BSD) make OpenOffice.org even more appealing in environments where a variety of platforms are in use. The Native Language Confederation is working hard at getting OpenOffice.org localized in dozens of languages, and internationalization is built-in to the components, including support for bidirectional text, vertical text, and so on.

The biggest advantage OpenOffice.org enjoys over Office, of course, is that the former is free for the downloading while the latter will cost you. A lot. OpenOffice.org is released under the LGPL and the SISSL, two Open Source licenses that ensure that OpenOffice.org will always be free.

Free doesn't mean unsupported. The review mentioned below praised the OpenOffice.org for its ad-hoc support network. There is a rapidly growing body of online documentation, a wide variety of free community support and even commercial support available through Sun and others. Third-party books abound.

The United Kingdom-based PC Pro Magazine
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/labs/64884/openoffice-112.html endorsed OpenOffice.org in December, 2004 "over and above Microsoft Office 2003 for both home and office use." And that was version 1.1.4, the most recent version considered stable while 2.0 is in the latter stages of beta testing. OpenOffice.org 2.0 is expected to be released sometime later this month or next.

What's the Catch?

There are a few "gotchas" for those making the effort to switch over from Office to OpenOffice.org. For example, while Writer can be programmed using macros, Word macros won't work. Functions may be located in slightly different places. Where Word has a Table menu, for example, Writer's excellent table-manipulation functions are located in a dialog that appears contextually when you insert or access a table. Writer lacks a grammar checker; but it has been my
experience that Word's is scarcely useful. Impress is said to suffer from a lack of supplied templates, though the community will no doubt step forward to fill gaps such as this. Also, because the suite is based at least in part on Java, its performance isn't quite on par with that of native software, though it isn't bad at all.

There are other minor differences, annoyances and omissions; but for users who are more comfortable making the switch from such familiar tools as Microsoft Office to something new, there simply isn't much negative to say about OpenOffice.org, particularly about the upcoming 2.0 version.

The best thing is that it won't cost you a cent to figure out whether you like OpenOffice.org better than, or at least as well as MS Office. It's a free download, and while it's a large download (over 100MB - a few minutes even on a broadband connection) it installs easily and cleanly. It does require Sun's Java, which is also a free download, available at the Java website http://java.sun.com and 128MB of RAM on your machine.

We urge you to give OpenOffice.org a spin. We're confident you'll be as impressed as we are, and it's one less reason to depend on Microsoft for the smooth and cost-efficient functioning of your business. We still don't think that's a good idea.

Trevor Bauknight is a web designer and writer with over 15 years of experience on the Internet. He specializes in the creation and maintenance of business and personal identity online and can be reached at [email protected]. Stop by http://www.cafeid.com for a free tryout of the revolutionary SiteBuildingSystem and check out our Flash-based website and IMAP e-mail hosting solutions, complete with live support.