A credible rival to MS Office, OpenOffice.org includes powerful applications for making text documents, spreadsheets, presentations, diagrams, and databases, as well as HTML and XML documents. Not only does it let you edit basic documents, such as letters and faxes, it also handles equations and complex and multipart documents with bibliographies, reference tables, and indexes.
Updated just a few hours ago, OpenOffice has added a few tweaks that are worth a try, and maybe even worth replacing Microsoft Office. Now with faster load times and more sleak highlighting (great for editing papers!), it is much more worth it to download this free software.
I like to think of OpenOffice as the Firefox of the office suites. It is the replacement that lot’s of people enjoy and use all the time. It supports 27 languages and has more added all the time.
OpenOffice 3.2 for Windows, Mac, and Linux also sees the debut of comments in Impress, encryption support for Office 2007-formatted files, and smoother sort, merge, and copy and paste functions in Calc.
The only thing that this product seems to lack is Windows 7 specific features, like Aero peek and and jump lists. Hopefully those will come around soon, but this is a multiplatform application, so let’s just say that the product is doing it’s job quite nicely.
