Reaction post on OpenOffice Software
This is a reaction to Don Black’s article on “OpenOffice“.
I have been using OpenOffice from OpenOffice.org for more than two years. It is very compatible with MS Office. That includes not just Word (.doc) documents but also Excel (.xls) files. My wife and I exchange documents all the time (she is a die-hard MS Office user).
The only current problem is that OpenOffice doesn’t read documents from MS Office 2008. However, neither do earlier versions of MS Office! The next version of OpenOffice is due for release very soon and will support MS Office 2008. The only other issue with OO is the lack of an Australian dictionary, but I managed to find one eventually.
There is a bigger concern here than just the office suites themselves that you may be missing. The problem is that Microsoft as a private company has control of the dominant document format. It is proprietary and they don’t release the details publicly. If some other company wants to read Word documents, they have to reverse engineer the format. It’s only recently that the European Courts have forced Microsoft to publish some of their formats.
Not everyone is happy that a private company controls the format that billions of documents are stored in around the world. There is a vast legacy of stored information that could be lost forever if Microsoft should ever decide to stop supporting older formats. An international standard named Open Document Format (ODF) has been ratified by the International Standards Organisation (ISO) to overcome this problem. OpenOffice supports ODF. Microsoft with MS Office refuses to (they have a competing ’standard’).
I believe it would be a very good thing if schools switched to OO as their office suite. After all it is free! Support is not really an issue but can be bought from various companies for a price. The company behind OO is Sun Systems.
Here’s a site where you can read more about it.
In regard to who is using OO, it’s a little hard to tell. The US Defense Department is one that I know of. Since the software is not sold but downloaded for free, it is hard to know exactly how many organisations are using it and who they are. This article might shed some light on usage. I suspect the majority of the downloads are for home use at present.
