The Apache Software Foundation recently announced that the Apache OpenOffice Suite has been downloaded more than 100 million times within the last 2 years, making it without a doubt one of the top alternatives to the much more expensive Microsoft Office. To top it all off, Apache OpenOffice is open source, free to all users, and works with Microsoft Office files.
Much like Microsoft Office, OpenOffice offers a suite of productivity tools. OpenOffice includes an open-source document tool as an alternative to Word, a spreadsheet tool alternative to Excel, a presentation tool alternative to PowerPoint, a vector graphics creation tool, a database creation tool, and a mathematical formula editor. SourceForge offers more than 750 extensions, and 2,800 templates.
OpenOffice tools are very similar in function and layout to their Office cousins. Compatibility is rarely an issue, though there is the now and again minor issue with file saving and conversion.
OpenOffice’s Word tool Writer offers similar document templates to Word, frames, mail merge, style management, section-based headers and footers, and more. The Base tool offers database design and formatting tools.
A new popular feature of the latest OpenOffice version is the sidebar feature which allows the launch of commonly used OpenOffice tools. The sidebar is especially designed for large monitor users, and helps make OpenOffice features quickly and easily available. The sidebar displays the most commonly used functions, and control sets are grouped into 22 panels which can be opened or collapsed as needed. Third party extensions are also available to improve the sidebar.
There are a number of alternatives to OpenOffice as well.
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