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OpenOffice.org

Also relates to Basic and The Office

Over the weekend I finally decided to give my modem a grilling and download OpenOffice.org. I have heard a lot of favourable reviews about it around the web and been wanting to do a comparison to MS Office for a while. Besides the four hour plus download time (inluding the developer manuals), I have been immediately impressed. At first glance it does not appear to have the depth of MS Office (I currently use 2000), yet at the same time, the GUI is visually clear and very easy to get to grips with. I had read in an Amazon review, I think, that the learning curve was quite steep. Well, I see this as far from the truth. If I were to recommend a suite for a newcomer to Office tools, I would certainly push this over Office. The interface presents less steps to some common formatting tasks, like table creation/insertions and style manipulation.

What I have found most exciting is the clarity and simplicity of building extensions using both Basic (OpenOffice version) and more extensive UNO interfaces with Java over TCP. My Java experience is not extensive, but I had a client-server connection up and running within a few hours with data manipulation functions on a Calc (Spreadsheet, Excel equivalent) file. Having built numerous application in VBA for Access, the Basic IDE was familiar, and the object library is readily navigable. The flexibility to program custom interfaces (with component libraries available for Python and C as well) seems to be far more available than in MS, where much information is buried away in cryptic files on MSDN. The Developer's Guide [Note 14MB PDF] and the API Reference Manual are both good places to start learning.

So, OpenOffice.org may not have the depth of features that MS Office has, or perhaps I haven't delved deep enough yet anyway? But, this is an Open Source Project, it does not cost anything, and is a must for a small business considering an alternative to MS Office or the starter MS Works. Perhaps the one thing it does lack is an integrated mail client, like Outlook, but then it would appear Mozilla can be readily integrated with it's own mail client.

Posted on Jul 13, 2003 at 22:56:29. [Comments for OpenOffice.org- 0]