A different kind of office

Jeremy Wagstaff   |  Mon, 05/19/2008 11:51 AM  |  Sci-Tech

A few weeks back I was grumbling about the new Microsoft Office interface, and suggested that if you were also having problems, you switch to OpenOffice, a free replacement. So I thought I'd put my money where my mouth is: Does OpenOffice shape up?

First off, some history. OpenOffice was an application suite developed in the 1990s by a German company called Star Division (hence the name at that time, StarOffice). Sun Microsystems bought the software in 1999 and made it free; the next year it made the source code (the programming behind the software) available for anyone to play with. OpenOffice was born.

Sun wasn't just being nice: It takes the OpenOffice code for its own proprietary StarOffice product, which it then adds bits and pieces to. Version 2 of OpenOffice was released in 2005, and a beta version of version 3 is now available to try out -- and that's the one I'm trying now. Oh, and officially the software is called OpenOffice.org, because of trademark issues. Its geek fanbase, of course, calls it "OOo".

Just because this thing is developed by volunteers doesn't mean it's sloppy and unpolished: The 200-megabyte download is big, but installs seamlessly, and looks very familiar to traditional Office users. (Well, except for the snazzy Office 2007 ribbon, which is notable by its absence on "OOo".)

The package (with versions available for Windows, Mac and Linux) comes with a word processor, a spreadsheet, a PowerPoint-like presentation program, as well as a database, drawing and diagram program, and a mathematical formula thing (I've no idea what this is.) There's no email or contact program, though they (and I) recommend checking out Thunderbird, the sister program to the open source Firefox, for email.

There's nothing here that's going to make you go "wow!" right out of the box (unless the prospect of saving yourself oodles of money does.) The programs all look fine, if a little prosaic. "OOo" 3 supposedly boasts a raft of new icons and buttons, but they are all remarkably similar to those in version 2, and are a little, well, 1990s, if you know what I mean. None of the glamour and panache of the Firefox interface here.

But this is a minor consideration. OpenOffice is solid and comes with the features you expect. All the menus are in the place you'd expect them, and Word documents -- including the new 2007 format -- open pretty much as you'd expect them to.

Indeed, the guys behind "OOo" have done a good job in not only trying to anticipate where you might look for commands, but to actually make them more intuitive than Microsoft's.

Insert a row in a table in Office 2007, for example, and you'd right click to bring up the little menu, choose Insert in the hope that that would take you to the right place, and then select from the sub-menu "Insert row above" or "Insert row below". OK, but useless if I want to insert more than one row.

"OOo", instead, offers a menu item on right click which says Row -- good, because that's clearer to me that I'm going into the right menu -- and then lets me choose how many rows I want to insert, all in one go. Smart, and pretty obvious.

Other nice little touches: You can create PDF Acrobat files without any extra, or expensive, plug-ins. (Just choose Export as PDF from the file menu.) And yes: You can import, work in, and save documents in Microsoft formats if you want to.

Where you're likely to get frustrated, however, is when you play around with complex files. Most Word documents opened fine, although sometimes a bit wonky, and "OOo" lets me do with them the difficult things I want to. But one reviewer, Adrian Kingsley-Hughes of ZDNet, complained of problems when he inserted charts in OOo's spreadsheet program, Calc. He also found that opening PowerPoint files in "OOo's" version, Impress, was "an unmitigated disaster".

Fair enough (though I have problems opening PowerPoint files in PowerPoint programs on other computers, to be honest. And charts always look weird to me.)

Some Mac users have had better luck, by the way, with NeoOffice (neooffice.org), which is what they call a fork from OpenOffice.org -- in other words, some guys took the source code and decided to develop it in a different direction.

I think these products work with a certain kind of person: Someone who hates spending lots of money on software, most of whose features lie unused. If you're a heavy Word or Excel or PowerPoint user, then you probably should stick with Microsoft.

If you're using these things for letters, basic spreadsheets and the occasional presentation, or you're knitting out a new office, company or organization and don't have a big software budget (and don't fancy a visit from the police for using pirate software), then OpenOffice.org is definitely worth a try.

Jeremy Wagstaff writes for The Wall Street Journal Asia and the BBC World Service. His guide to technology, Loose Wire, is available in bookshops or on Amazon. He can be found online at jeremywagstaff.com or via email at jeremy@loose-wire.com.

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