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Open Office | View information about Open Office within our Technology Website Directory section by reviewing this area of our website. We provide a wealth of information online to help our visitors become better informed about Computer Buzz. |
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Open Office
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OpenOffice.org (aka OOo or OO.o) is a free software office suite available for multiple operating systems including Linux, Windows, MacOS X, Solaris, FreeBSD, OpenVMS and IRIX. It supports the OpenDocument standard for data interchange, and can also read and write files from other common office software packages including MS Office.
This package is informally referred to as "Open Office," but project organizers report that this term is a trademark already registered, thus requiring them to adopt the clumsy "OpenOffice.org" as its formal name.
OpenOffice.org is based on StarOffice, an office suite originally developed in Germany and acquired by Sun Microsystems in August 1999. The source code of the suite was released in July 2000 with the intention of reducing the dominant market share of Microsoft Office by providing a free, open, high-quality alternative.
Computer Buzz finds that OpenOffice.org is easy to learn, and if you have ever used another office software package, you'll take to OpenOffice.org right away. If you already have files from another office package, OpenOffice.org will read them with no difficulty.
Best of all, OpenOffice.org can be downloaded and used entirely free of any license fees, because it is released under the GNU Lesser General Public License. This means you may use it for any purpose domestic, commercial, educational, or whatever. You may install it on as many computers as you like. You may make copies and give them away to family, friends, students, and employees anyone you like.
At a cost of zero, OpenOffice.org may very well be the one single most valuable software deal in all of cyberspace. Computer Buzz can not recommend this program loudly enough.
OpenOffice.org has four main components:
1) Writer is the word processor.
2) Calc is the spreadsheet.
3) Impress is the presentation package.
4) Draw is the tool to create graphics and drawings.
Official Website: www.OpenOffice.org
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Writer - word processor
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Writer is a word processor that is extremely similar in look and feel to Microsoft Word, and it offers a comparable range of functions and tools. It can be used for anything from a one-page note to a 900-page novel. Writer includes the ability to export PDF files and can also function as a WYSIWYG editor for creating and editing web pages.
One significant difference between Writer and Microsoft Word is that in Writer, many functions and number formats from the spreadsheet Calc are available in Writer's tables.
Computer Buzz has tested this application extensively, and we find it to be delightfully powerful, easy to use, and certainly more stable than MS Word. With the exception of a couple of outstanding word processors for the Mac, this is currently our favorite.
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Calc - spreadsheet module
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Calc is the full-featured spreadsheet component of OpenOffice.org that is closely analogous to Microsoft Excel. It provides the functions necessary for professional use with financial and statistical functions as well as database functions. It has a large number of statistical and scientific functions, and can create pivot tables, charts and more.
Data that can be summarized into records, such as addresses, inventory levels, customer orders or similar, can also be managed by Calc. Even if there are no calculations, Calc can quickly sort a database range and search the data for specific characteristics, such as maximum or minimum values.
Calc is useful for creating term papers because it supports many statistical functions such as regression analysis. And for daily calculations at work, the integrated financial functions are helpful, because they can be used to print detailed tables of current credits and loans and other data.
Calc has a charting function that can display spreadsheet data graphically by selecting the data to be displayed and clicking the Insert Chart icon. Drag open a frame at the required position, define specific chart settings in the dialogue that appears. The chart is inserted at the selected position and, when the source data are modified, is dynamically updated.
Data from other spreadsheets programs can be imported, edited in Calc and, output in different export formats. We see no reason to shell out a couple of hundred bucks for Excel when this freebie has more than enough muscle to handle all of our spreadsheet needs.
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Impress - presentation module
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Impress is OpenOffice.org's slide show program that equates with Microsoft's Power Point and Apple's Keynote software. This easy-to-learn application, which features user-friendly functions and standard toolbars and menus, allows you to create a wide variety of slide layouts for visually attractive presentations. With Impress, you can create slides that contain many different elements, including: text, bulleted and numbered lists, tables, charts, clip art, and a wide array of graphic objects. It also comes with spell check, a thesaurus, pre-set text styles, attractive background styles, and a handy help menu.
Presentations have more than just drawings and graphics to offer. You can use presentations to link several slides to form a slide show, to animate the elements on the slides and to assign special transition effects between slides.
Computer Buzz estimates that most computer users don't have the occasion to use presentation software like this twice in the same lifetime, but if you happen to be one of the rare exceptions, Impress is all you will need.
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Draw - vector and bit map drawing module
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OpenOffice.org Draw is a powerful drawing tool with which you can create complex diagrams and charts. It supports both vector and bitmap images. Draw offers a series of powerful tools that enable you to quickly create all sorts of graphics. It is well integrated into the OpenOffice.org suite, and this makes exchanging graphics with all modules of the suite extremely easy. For example, it is relatively simple to draw an image and reuse it in the Writer and Impress modules. You can also work directly from within Writer and Impress using a subset of the functions and tools from the Draw module.
The Draw module functionality is remarkably extensive and complete. It is not intended to rival high end graphics applications, yet it possesses more functions than the majority of drawing tools that are integrated into office productivity suites.
Draw's functions include: layer management, magnetic grid point system, dimensions and measurement display, connectors for making organization charts, 3D functions enabling small 3D drawings to be created (with texture and lighting effects), drawing and page style integration, and Bezier curves.
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