OpenOffice.org

OpenOffice.org is an office application suite which includes a word processor, spreadsheet program, slide/presentation program, and much more. Though many refer to it as "OpenOffice", the full name of the project is "OpenOffice.org" for legal reasons.

Introduction

History

OpenOffice originally started as a product named StarOffice, released by StarDivision and purchased by Sun Microsystems in 1999. Sun retained the StarOffice name, and in 2000 released the source code to the project in hopes that others would take up the torch and continue to produce a "Microsoft Office killer." The OpenOffice group did just this, and have kept the software not only current, but have expanded it with new features and endeavor to keep Microsoft Office compatibility.

Compatibility with MS Office

OpenOffice is compatible with most MS Office features, only some of the more esoteric functions requiring a little extra care when porting documents from one format to another (most of the people in the building have found no issues reading or writing MS Office files). It remains to be seen if the new Office Open XML format helps this compatibility or not.

Installing

OpenOffice is installed on the Peyton network, so simply running 'soffice' from a terminal window should bring up the program.

If you wish to install it on your personal machine, visit http://www.openoffice.org to download the latest version and follow the instructions there for installing. Note that as of this writing, there is no Aqua version for Mac OS that works well; either you must have X11 installed and running (which most of us do anyway), or use something like NeoOffice instead.