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Open source alternatives to expensive licensed products can save you a bundle. In this "Saving money with open source" series, learn about three open source options for your operating system, office application suite, and groupware server:
- Part 1 reviews Ubuntu, a very capable and usable open source operating system that can easily provide the basis for your desktop or server infrastructure.
- This article explores the features and functions of the OpenOffice application suite, and how it compares to Microsoft® Office®.
- In Part 3, learn about OpenChange, which provides a portable open source implementation of Microsoft Exchange Server and Exchange protocols. Exchange is a groupware server designed to work with Microsoft Outlook, and provides features such as a messaging server, shared calendars, contact databases, public folders, notes, and tasks.
On the desktop, the operating system and environment are less important than the applications that support the main operating functions for your office. Your business drives your application requirements, but most businesses will also use an office suite, such as OpenOffice, to support their core operations.
The OpenOffice suite is open source, freely available, and completely compatible with a wide range of different office suites, including Microsoft Office. It's a compatible product, both in terms of file readability and usage, and you can try out OpenOffice with no barriers.
You can migrate to OpenOffice while keeping complete compatibility with your previous installation. Phased migrations are possible, such as that carried out by Banco do Brasil in 2005, which moved to OpenOffice and installed it on 75,000 workstations.
Download the source code to examine the OpenOffice content or download pre-compiled binary packages. They install the same way as any package on their corresponding platform and include the full range of applications and functions on all supported platforms.
Regardless of the market in which a company operates, nearly all require the services of a simple office suite. All office suites include the same three basic applications: a word processor, a spreadsheet application, and a presentation suite. The different applications can be used individually or together to provide the necessary tools.
- Word processing
- Required for letters, faxes, reports, and other documents. Usually includes a number of related tools and functions, such as the ability to run mail merges, and to create envelopes and other documents.
- Spreadsheets
- Used for tabulating data, producing plans and budgets, and even for handling the full accounting requirements for some companies.
- Presentation tools
- Used for basic presentations, keynotes, and sales pitches. Presentation tools are also often used to produce leaflets, guides, and other documents that have a clear paged format that might need a consistent look and feel throughout.
- Database applications
- Can be used for almost anything, from tracking simple names and addresses to providing a full application environment to support sales, order tracking, or other needs.
- Illustration or drawing applications
- An excellent way of building basic diagrams and flow charts.
Usually, the applications are used both individually and in combinations. For example, a common combination involves creating a list of names and addresses within a spreadsheet or database, and using this as the basis for a mail merge of letters and documents. Another common combination might use the drawing package to build the figures and illustrations within a report or other document.
The State of Kedah in Malaysia studied the use of office suites and determined that about 25 percent of the cost of a computer is for the license for a suitable office suite. This shows the significance of office suites and the expected cost (see Resources).
The OpenOffice suite is backed by Sun Microsystems and is an offshoot of the commercial StarOffice application suite. The two share the same source code and functions; the open source OpenOffice is subsidized by the commercial StarOffice.
IBM® also has released IBM Lotus® Symphony, which is an office suite based on OpenOffice technologies. As with other open source tools, the difference among OpenOffice, StarOffice, and Lotus Symphony is with the support. OpenOffice is a community project, and support is provided by the community through Web sites, blogs, wikis, discussion lists, and forums. For StarOffice, you can get e-mail and phone support, and longer-term service plans.
OpenOffice is available for a wide range of platforms, so you should be able to find a version for your operating system. Versions exist using the native windowing system. You can find versions of OpenOffice for Windows® (even for older versions, such as Windows 95 and Windows 98), Linux®, Mac OS X, Solaris, and FreeBSD.
OpenOffice also includes a wide range of applications as part of the basic package. The main components of OpenOffice are listed below.
Table 1. Main components of OpenOffice
| Application | Description |
|---|---|
| Writer | Word processor, similar to Microsoft Word®, Apple Pages, and WordPerfect. |
| Calc | Spreadsheet, similar to Microsoft Excel® or Apple Numbers. |
| Impress | Presentation, similar to Microsoft Powerpoint® or Apple Keynote. |
| Base | Database, similar to Microsoft Access® or Filemaker Pro. |
| Draw | Vector graphics and illustrations, similar to Microsoft Visio® or The Omni Group's OmniGraffle. |
| Math | Equations and mathematical formulae, similar to Microsoft Equation Editor. |
As you'd expect with any typical suite, across the range of OpenOffice applications, you get compatibility and cooperation among the applications and a number of common features. Usability and compatibility has more about compatibility with other application suites.
Application suites commonly include features not typically found in many other software packages. For example, with OpenOffice, you can export to the PDF from any of the applications directly, without having to use a third-party conversion or export tool.
You can also export to more unusual formats, such as the quasi-HTML formatting supported by most Web-based wiki environments. You can very easily create information and documents to share on the company intranet, without having to write the information in native HTML or by uploading the document to the Internet.
The rest of this section discusses key features of the four main applications.
Write, the word-processor component of OpenOffice, offers the type of environment and compatibility you'd expect within a typical word processor. Since it provides compatibility with Microsoft Word, it also retains much of the same functionality.
The basic — such as full formatting, paragraph styles, page layout, page break, section breaks, and the ability to spell check and correct your documents — are all features you expect in a typical word-processing application. But Write offers other facilities and enhancements, too.
For example, you get basic inline spell and grammar checking while you are typing (Write highlights potential spelling problems as you type). Write also provides the ability to automatically create indexes and table of contents pages, and to insert and merge content (photos, illustrations, tables, spreadsheet fragments) into your documents.
Figure 1. Sample Write document
Word-processor functions have become so familiar that it's difficult to provide differentiation in the marketplace. Compatibility and usability are of much greater importance, and OpenOffice achieves both perfectly.
One of the oldest types of applications deals with tabulating data, then performing calculations on the information. The Calc application provides these functions within OpenOffice, and it supports many of the same functions and abilities as most other spreadsheet applications.
Like Microsoft Excel, a single document can support a number of spreadsheets. You can rename, organize, and provide links among these sheets as necessary. You also have access to a full range of functions to support the necessary calculations, reports, and summaries of the data within the spreadsheets. Figure 2 shows a sample Calc document.
Figure 2. Sample Calc document
Within Calc, you also have access to other functions used to format and organize your information. You can sort the rows within a table of data according to the data type, allowing you to order by figures — alphabetically and by date. Lookup and summary functions can provide simpler views on your data. For more complex data layouts, you can use the PivotTable system.
Like Write, Calc provides features and functions eminently obvious, and yet also vital to the usability of the office. And just like Write, Calc looks and feels like Microsoft Office, making it an easy-to-use, straightforward alternative.
The Impress presentation application is designed to provide compatibility with Microsoft Powerpoint. As with Powerpoint, building your presentations with Impress is based on a presentation template, with different templates used for the different types of page within the presentation.
You can import and export content from different places. It's easy to convert the outline and content from Write and make a presentation from the text. You can also import and include illustrations and figures from a variety of sources, and draw basic shapes and diagrams straight into the pages. Figure 3 shows a sample Impress presentation.
Figure 3. Sample presentation in Impress
The quality of the graphics rendering and the resulting appearance of slides has been improved significantly in recent OpenOffice versions. The quality is now very polished. You shouldn't spot any significant differences between the quality of the slides when importing a document into Impress.
There are some limitations to the environment supported by Impress. The full range of transitions you might be familiar with are not available. Animations and interactivity on slides within the deck are also somewhat more limited than other packages. These are minor considerations, but worth noting if you perform presentations frequently and use these advanced techniques.
Database packages typically have a wide scope, both in terms of expectations and required functions. Some people only need a simple way of storing basic record data, while others want to build a mini-application using the database component as the core.
Unfortunately, Base doesn't provide the same rich application environment provided by Microsoft Access. Base does provide the main functions you need in a database application, such as the ability to create a basic input template, produce reports, and import and export data to other applications and parts of OpenOffice.
With Base, you do not have the ability to make a full application with scripted elements and operations. You cannot, for example, create a sales and order-tracking system that provides a button that produces an invoice and marks the invoice sent or produced. These scripted elements are what set Microsoft Access and Filemaker Pro apart from the basic database storage functions offered in Base. If you're looking to support a database application of this type, OpenOffice will not be a suitable alternative.
An interesting element of Base is that you can also connect to external database sources through both native and ODBC and JDBC interfaces. You can provide an interface within Base that connects to a MySQL or Oracle database without creating a custom application.
Languages and international support
The ability to work and operate with several languages and localizations is a key point, or requirement, for many organizations.
OpenOffice is in wide use across a huge range of countries. In part, the open source nature has helped to breed this compatibility by making it easy for individuals and companies to contribute localization, dictionaries, and other materials to the project.
You can find localized versions of OpenOffice in Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America, from countries and environments as diverse as Korea, India, and Russia. You'll find OpenOffice in organizations from governments to magazines and manufacturing.
In a market completely dominated by Microsoft Office, it's impossible to provide any kind of office application suite without including the ability to read and write files in the Microsoft Office format.
Fortunately, the team behind OpenOffice spent a lot of time ensuring that the feature set of OpenOffice is substantial. With OpenOffice, you can open Microsoft Office documents and save them without losing any of the functions or data in the process. This works both with the original Microsoft Office binary file formats and with the newer XML-based formats. Conveniently, Microsoft has been working to provide additional support and compatibility with the OpenDocument format used by OpenOffice, helping to ensure that files and companies using the two suites retain compatibility.
You can load a Microsoft Office document into the corresponding component within OpenOffice and expect it to work without any problems. This works even when using advanced functions, such as the change tracking within Microsoft Word often used to help monitor the changes between different versions of a document.
Several companies that chose to migrate to OpenOffice cite this compatibility as the main reason for the success of the move. Liberty High School in Benicia, Calif., and Bacchus Marsh Grammer in Victoria, Australia, have both found that the compatibility has made the deployment of OpenOffice so much easier (see Resources).
The only way to be absolutely sure of compatibility is to exchange documents between your existing applications and OpenOffice. As a free application, there are no barriers or costs to trying it out. It is unlikely that you'll find any problems, but it's also important to be sure.
For the more complicated functions within OpenOffice, there are wizards and walk-throughs that describe each stage of the process, and make it very clear what you need to do at each stage. Again, this will be familiar to any user of Microsoft Office, which makes heavy use of the wizard interface.
In nearly all cases, the functions in OpenOffice are provided in exactly the same format and naming as with other office suites. There are obvious benefits to this: installing OpenOffice and getting people up to speed on the new suite will take very little effort.
Another area of importance for many office suite users is the availability of additional extensions, templates, and enhancements to the base application. These can take many forms, and can perform several different functions. They often help to enhance or simplify a particular area of the system.
Templates are a good example. OpenOffice already comes with a number of standard templates, but you can download many more for handling specific problems. For Write there are memo, report, thesis, and other templates to make the production of professional documents as easy as downloading the right template and inserting your content. For Calc, you can download savings calculators, budget tables, balance sheets, and other templates.
In addition to templates and sample documents, OpenOffice also supports extensions and plug-ins that provide more functions to the main applications. Like the templates, there is a wide range of different solutions.
For example, there's an extension that lets you remotely manage your blog and blog posts from within Write. The result is a combination of a familiar word-processing environment, and the spell checking, word completion, and other tools you're familiar with — all with a simple one-click interface for publishing the completed document to your blog. In a company where there might not be many people who are comfortable with creating a blog post (including formatting the post using HTML), this kind of function makes OpenOffice a suitable, and familiar, environment.
With OpenOffice, a whole community has evolved to provide these additional parts of the OpenOffice environment. There is no shortage of available options, or of people producing and sharing content.
Most people will be able to use OpenOffice without any special training because the menus, their content, and the functions behind them are nearly identical to other office suites. The feature compatibility ensures that most users will be able to use OpenOffice without changing the way they do any typical tasks.
With OpenOffice, you have access to a full suite of office applications that will provide a significant portion of your core functional requirements. It's hard to find any kind of fault in the functions or usability of either Write or Calc. There are limitations in the other packages, and you should keep them in mind if presentations and databases are a key part of your office suite requirements. If your primary needs are word processing and spreadsheets, there is little reason not to use OpenOffice. You will retain the ability to work with your existing documents, and the ability to exchange documents with coworkers, regardless of the office suite they use.
Part 2 of this series delves into OpenChange, which provides a portable open source implementation of Microsoft Exchange Server and Exchange protocols.
Learn
-
Learn all about OpenOffice.
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"Banco do Brasil, a
successful case on the OpenOffice.org migration" describes Banco do Brasil's successful installation of OpenOffice in
more than 71,000 workstations, distributed among the branches and corporate offices.
-
"'Academy' builds business case for Linux in gov't"
outlines how the Birmingham City Council replaced the software on 300 PCs at
its central library, and 39 local libraries, with open source.
-
Read "The State of Kedah
moves to OpenOffice.org."
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Martin Brown has been a professional writer for over eight years. He is the author of numerous books and articles across a range of topics. His expertise spans myriad development languages and platforms -- Perl, Python, Java, JavaScript, Basic, Pascal, Modula-2, C, C++, Rebol, Gawk, Shellscript, Windows, Solaris, Linux, BeOS, Mac OS/X and more -- as well as Web programming, systems management and integration. Martin is a regular contributor to ServerWatch.com, LinuxToday.com and IBM developerWorks, and a regular blogger at Computerworld, The Apple Blog and other sites, as well as a Subject Matter Expert (SME) for Microsoft. He can be contacted through his Web site at http://www.mcslp.com.
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