An indepth look at OpenOffice.org Office Suite

OpenOffice.org is arguably the finest office suites available in the public domain. It is a direct competitor of Microsoft Office. It includes a Word processor (OpenOffice.org Writer), a Spreadsheet (OpenOffice.org Calc),a Presentation program (OpenOffice.org Impress), a Drawing program (OpenOffice.org Draw) and a Database (OpenOffice.org Base).


While it might seem ironic to blog about this fabulous piece of open source software now, especially owing to the recent developments of Oracle taking over Sun Microsystems, fact remains that this is one office suite that has stood its ground against Microsoft Office - and even posed a threat to it.

But for a first timer, like any software, there is a learning curve involved in mastering OpenOffice.org. It involves getting to know the interface, knowing the equivalent functions of the suite vis-a-vis Microsoft Office, and being productive. This is where a well balanced tutorial gains importance.

WorldLabels.com blog has posted an in-depth article explaining the various features of OpenOffice.org and also comparing OpenOffice.org Writer with Microsoft Word (2003 & 2007). But that is not all, the article elucidates on the 6 step process involved in shifting from using Microsoft Office to using OpenOffice.org in an organization, which is really enlightening to say the least. While the article is essentially Windows centric, the functions and tips explained in it are applicable to even Linux users as OpenOffice.org is a truly cross platform software. The article is dotted with a vagary of links to very useful plug-ins and templates. For instance, do you know how to reduce the size of your presentation in OpenOffice.org ? This article teaches you that.

New features in OpenOffice.org 3.1

OpenOffice.org rocks! Big time. The OpenOffice.org office suite which comes bundled with Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex which I am running on my machine, is version 2.4 even though version 3.0 has been released for some time now. But supposedly big things are happening in the yet to be officially released OpenOffice.org 3.1.

Some of the visual enhancements being - Antialiasing of images making them smooth, improvements in charts, grammar checking and hyperlinks management, just to name a few. Will OpenOffice.org 3.1 be a Microsoft Office 2007 killer ? May be not. But it is closing the gap by leaps and bounds passing each (minor) version release. More over, it can be obtained by one and all at an unbeatable price - Free.

Learn more about the new features being introduced in OpenOffice.org 3.1 which is due to be officially released 63 days hence.

IBM Lotus Symphony Office suite for Linux - free download

IBM has released a beta version of its new Office suite named Symphony and has made it available as a free download. It contains four software namely "Lotus Symphony Documents", "Lotus Symphony Presentations", "Lotus Symphony Spreadsheets" and an integrated web browser. But what should be quite interesting is that IBM has released a Linux version of this office suite too though it works only on Red Hat Enterprise Linux ver 5 and Suse Linux ver 10 for the time being.

I downloaded the Linux version of IBM's Symphony Office suite and I was able to install it without any problem. One of the striking feature of Symphony is that you can Open the document, spreadsheet and presentation files all within the main interface and the files will be opened in tabs which is quite a convenience.

Fig: Welcome page when Symphony starts

Fig: Menu to open new documents

The interface is well designed and built using Eclipse IDE. One of the highlights of Lotus Symphony is that it is based on the Open Document Format (ODF) standard - which means you're not locked into proprietary file formats, software licensing agreements and upgrades. Symphony can open Microsoft Office documents be they MSWord, Excel or Powerpoint files without any problem.

Fig: Document interface of Symphony

But when it is compared to Microsoft Office or even OpenOffice.org, I feel Symphony has a bit more catching up to do. For example, in OpenOffice.org, when you insert an image, you can drag and place it in any location in the document, which I find is a very nice feature. But I was not able to do this in Symphony document. And you cannot open or save encrypted Doc or ODF files nor can you edit or save encrypted macro libraries. More over since Symphony is a free offering from IBM, you can avail of help only from the support forums and not directly from IBM.

The minimum specifications needed to run Symphony are at least 512 MB RAM and 540-750 MB of free disk space. If you are interested, you can download a beta 3 version of Symphony and take it for a run.