I remember when PC-XT was introduced. They had a hard disk. Unbelievable! Nobody had thought of it before, only "floppy" floppies. There's a reason they were called so. Anyway, coming back to the XT, 640kB RAM was the norm and if you could afford it, you had 1MB. DOS (we had two kinds, MS-DOS and PC-DOS) was the only OS and it came in floppies. If your floppy went bad, you were out of luck. Copy protection was the bread and butter of many people and simple boot viruses were rampant.

Cut to 18 years later... 1GB, that's 1000MB, is insufficient memory and hard disks are getting smaller in size but larger in capacity. Funnily enough, most users use the computers (XT or the current multi-core PCs) for the exact same applications as before. Office applications. Bill Gates is a visionary and an opportunist. And I envy him, just like millions of others. Not for his money, but for his killer instinct.

Office applications are the predominant reason computers are purchased today, just as it was a decade ago. Internet and email come a close second. I am not talking about the people in glass and aluminum buildings staring into the computer screens all day long. The people I refer to are those who need to focus on their business and customers, to whom IT is just another productivity process. The computer is truly a tool for such people. And the office suite is the reason they consider it a tool.

I am building up to all this and show how important an office suite is to us today and the de facto application used is Microsoft Office. Pirated or otherwise at
USD 324.97 on Amazon, it is still too expensive for many of us.

At this price, it will not be affordable for many of the "real life" people I mentioned earlier. Instead, they might choose to use pirated copies of the expensive office suite. What they don't know can hurt them. Pirated copies can lead to some really heavy fines these days. They don't know that they have a free alternative to the office suite that is better if not as good as Microsoft Office.

OpenOffice.org is among the most popular open source alternative to MS Office. Officially adopted by Sun Microsystems, but maintaining the Open Source nature, it packs a heavy punch. There are a lot of internet sites that give you a very good comparison between the two applications such as http://www.techsoup.org/learningcenter/software/page4765.cfm . This article will become too long if I launch a feature by feature comparison. Here are some pointers to get you started in your search as you wade through the scores of websites on this.

OOo is so popular that many organizations, large ones at that, use it exclusively. There are dozens of websites that provide tips and tricks, most of them are listed on the OOo website. They even developed a standard that competes with Microsoft's standard for ISO certification.

Some facts

* OOo (OpenOffice.org) can handle all MS Office file formats. It can seamlessly read documents, spreadsheets and presentations. There are some limitations, one of them is that your pivot tables in Excel will not import well. But, in my opinion, that should'nt be a big hindrance for most of us.

* OOo will always be free. Free as in Free Beer and also as in Free Speech. Updates to OOo will also be free. It uses Open Standards, nothing proprietary, thereby lending itself to free interchangeability with other applications that use the same standards.

* OOo is available as a portable application. If you have ever had a dream of carrying your own office suite in a thumb drive, complete with your own data, this is it.

* OOo might be a little slower opening some complex MS Office documents, but these days a second or two hardly matters with the ultra fast, multi-core CPUs.

* OOo files are smaller in size, not that it matters these days, but it is a fact and I am stating facts. :)

* OOo will not feel like a totally new system to MS Office users. There will be some differences, but you encounter such differences moving from one version to another anyway.

* Support is a different ballgame altogether. Microsoft provides support for MS Office. And you will find tons of books, online material and forums for support. If you can afford to pay for the software, support or books, you might not be interested in this article anyways. OOo now has a similar support structure including books and paid support. But then, there are tons of free support resources that you don't have to pay for it, really. Just look at http://support.openoffice.org and you will be pleasantly surprised.

* OOo has a feature that Microsoft did not consider important. Creating pdf files directly from within the suite. Any application in the OOo suite can create pdf at the press of a button.

So what are you waiting for now? Go to http://www.openoffice.org and try it out.

Next time: Importance of back office applications. 

Venkat Mangudi is an Open Source Evangelist and Strategy Consultant based in Bangalore. After having worked across Europe, Asia and the US, Venkat returned home to set up a consulting firm called quite unimaginatively, Venkat Mangudi Consulting (www.venkatmangudi.com). He can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Issue BG85 Apr 08

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