OpenOffice.org

Type of Program: Office Suite
Supported Platforms: Win 95r2/98/2000/ME/NT/XP/Linux/Mac/Solaris
Company Name: OpenOffice.org
Version: 1
Price: Free
Installed Size: 110 meg

Download/Homepage

OpenOffice.org 1.0 has everything an office suite should have; word processor, spreadsheet, math, graphic editing, HTML editing, and presentation modules. OpenOffice.org is an abbreviated clone of Star Office from Sun. Why? The reasons are complicated. Suffice it to say that OpenOffice.org is free and Star is not. The installation file is huge, over 50 megs, and takes hours to download with dial-up. Be sure to use a download manager just in case you get knocked off-line.

The word processor, Writer, has the functionality of major commercial suites, formatting, spell check, tables, graphics, thesaurus, even footnotes and end notes. It opens most document formats, including Star, MS Word and RTF. Calc opens MS Excel documents. The graphics manipulation package, Draw, is extensive. The equation editor, Math, looks very good. There is good integration with external email programs.

As I do not like programs to load automatically on start-up, I un-integrated the start manager. This, of course, caused the individual modules to load slower. Calc would not open my Lotus 123 spreadsheets and the graphics package froze my system. If you need a free suite with all the bells and whistles, and have your system maxed out with RAM, OpenOffice.org is the one for you. If all you're looking for is a trusty word processor with minimal features, keep looking.

Performance
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Reviewed by Janice Chandler
http://www.geocities.com/janicechandler/index.html

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