I have been using OpenOffice for some time now, and I am impressed with how much it has matured. I am so impressed that I am calling it my MS Office replacement for TechWarriors on a budget. It works so well that I use it for some of my large document products. This post shows 5 things that you need to know about OpenOffice after the break.
- It now comes in a Macintosh native version. For the longest time OpenOffice was available either as an X11 product that could run on the Mac, or a port of the product. Neither were acceptable. With release 3 OpenOffice comes as a Macintosh port. It doesn’t come with an Applescript Library, so you can’t use Applescript with the product.
- OpenOffice comes with a formula editor software. Now you can embed mathematical formulae within Writer and other documents. No more having to remember complex laTex commands. Use a GUI to build your mathematical formulae for your OpenOffice documents.
- Uses its own version of basic as it’s internal scripting language. The entire API is available for other scripting languages to use as well, like Python. Because the internal scripting language is a flavor of BASIC it is rather easy to learn, but knowing what objects to use to get what you want done is a very large task.
- OpenOffice would not be very good unless it could open MS Office documents. Well it can open all MS Office documents with the exception of Access databases. this means that you can open most MS Office documents given to you by customers and other workers in your organization. If your company is sticking to a zero Microsoft footprint then this consideration is important.
- OpenOffice uses writer documents to act as forms and reports for its Base product. In other words the forms and reports are word processor documents. That means a richer set of database style controls for Writer, the OpenOffice Word processor product. The same tools that you use for mail merge are used for report generation.
These are the five things you must know about OpenOffice. I hope that these five things might entice you to look deeper into OpenOffice.
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