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Free office software a good substitute for the costly version

Programs perform same functions as Microsoft Office

By Al Fasoldt
Newhouse News Service

You can’t get Microsoft Office free. The cheapest version costs about $130 (for the Student/Teacher edition), but folks who have no school or college connections usually pay a lot more – as much as $499 if you pay the full list price.

But you don’t have to pay a cent if you’re willing to settle for second best. I’ve been using a free alternative to Office for many years, through a number of revisions. The latest version, called OpenOffice, is exceptional in some ways. Considering the price, it’s downright outstanding.

What’s good about it
First, the good news. OpenOffice (officially called “OpenOffice.org”) is a widely respected suite of programs designed to perform the same functions as the programs in Microsoft Office. Open Office is available without cost for Windows, Linux and Macintosh OS X. You can download it from www.openoffice.org.

OpenOffice has an unusual parentage. It’s based on StarOffice, a commercial office suite from Sun Microsystems. Sun works with the OpenOffice developers to make sure Star Office and OpenOffice have similar features each time either one is revised.

The most important program in any such suite is the word processor, and in Microsoft Office and OpenOffice the word processor is superb. Microsoft Word, the word processor in Office, is the best program of its kind money can buy.

For programs money can’t buy, the word processor in OpenOffice, called Writer, is a knockout. It has the same menu structure and keyboard assignments as Word and does just about every normal function the same way. For most writing tasks, Writer is equal to Word.

But it’s not perfect. If you have to pass heavily formatted documents back and forth among computers for varying office uses, you’d probably be better off with Word. However, if you use a word processor for such tasks as homework and office letters, OpenOffice Writer will work splendidly. (And yes, it has an excellent spell-checker).

Excel compatibility is mostly in the “good news” category, too. If you use Microsoft Excel professionally – if you make money from your skill at Excel – stick with the real thing. But in my tests of Calc, the spreadsheet program in OpenOffice, I was able to do everything I normally do in Excel.

Microsoft’s PowerPoint is slick and easy to use, and there’s nothing but more good news in OpenOffice equivalent, called Impress. You can open, view and edit PowerPoint presentations in Impress without a problem. Impress is – dare I say it? – very impressive.

What’s bad about it
The bad news in any Office wannabe software usually involves Microsoft Access, which is difficult to clone. Not even OpenOffice comes close to offering a genuine substitute for it. As with Excel, if you make money from your skill at Access, stick with the genuine article.

But for all the rest of us, OpenOffice’s database program, called simply Base, should be sufficient. I was able to import standard Access data and manipulate it just as I would in Access, but I didn’t try anything fancy.

OpenOffice also has Draw, which competes with Microsoft’s Visio, to make what are loosely called business graphics, and Math, which does the same thing as the Microsoft Equation Editor. Both worked well in my tests.

Like Microsoft Office, the parts of OpenOffice are seamlessly integrated and you never have to guess what to do with documents.

Windows and Linux users can download and install the OpenOffice suite from www.openoffice.org. But my advice to Mac OS X users is to avoid the OS X version listed at the site and choose instead a more modern version, called NeoOffice. It’s also free. (It’s based on OpenOffice but uses native Mac OS X operating-system code.)
Get it from www.neoooffice.org.

NeoOffice is available in English, French, German, Spanish, Italian and Japanese, in addition to Vietnamese, Norwegian, Czech and Dutch.

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