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When you should move to OpenOffice?

Submitted by admin on Fri, 02/29/2008 - 15:37.

Why to consider the OpenOffice.org at all?

Ignoring the features and functionalities for a moment, there are various practical reasons:

OpenOffice.org is now available in more than 24 languages, and the projects for the additional languages are regularly announced. Moreover the program works on the Solaris, Linux and Windows operating systems. The Mac OS X version has the pre-releases working now. This interoperability is much beyond most of the alternatives to the MS Word.
OpenOffice.org has been released under Lesser General GNU Public License. As the open source software, it is free to download from the www.openoffice.org.
Because the OpenOffice.org is an open source, you can install it legally on any number of computer as you like. You can even reinstall it without the need for contacting that project first. This isn't possible with the MS Office.
Because the OpenOffice.org is an open source, the upgrades are even free. You could wait for the official upgrades or the releases as they are made available. You can even choose the current official release and the developer's build, which might be less stable, but has all the current features that are in development.
Free support is made available on mailing lists. This support is as accurate and as detailed as anyone of you can obtain from a paid tech support.
You as well as your company could join this OpenOffice.org project and influence the future development direction.
If your company requires a feature that is not there, your company could sponsor that feature's development. The only restriction being the finished feature would be made available to all.
If the company prefers the traditional relation with the software developer, the company could purchase the StarOffice from the Sun Microsystems for an amount $75.95 for the single copy, or around $50 per each copy for a bulk of 150. StarOffice is the enhanced version of the OpenOffice.org, with enhanced database, a manual, clipart and fonts and translation filters.

These reasons obviously are compelling to many. In the 1st month after the OpenOffice.org came out, the project had reported more than one million downloads. Nobody exactly knows the number of copies in circulation now, but the conservative estimate might be that there exist at least 10 million users in 2003. Judging based on the count of reviews and the tones, the demand is great for the StarOffice.

The benefits of the filters of the OpenOffice.org include:

A list of the things that they translate is very longer than a list of things that they don't. It contains indexes, comments, tables, equations --all of which aren't only the problematic in several other filters of translation, but some times do not even translate.
It isn't necessary to develop special template with some styles that make use of the same names as the styles of the MS Word to improve the translations.

While a number of the word processors crash while translating the files bigger than few megabytes, the OpenOffice.org appears to be able to handle the files of any size.

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