Open Office is one of the oldest and the most stable of the office suites that have been working to take Microsoft Office off of its throne and smash the castle that Monopoly has built. However, if you believe the talk, this was not the original intention of the system. The original intention, as it is understood, was to give the users of the Linux platform an office suite that they could call their own and use to send documents, create spreadsheets, and make databases.
Fortunately, this product did not stay inside the land of Linux users. It has migrated so that we can all enjoy this no cost, open source alternative to the office suite. Open Office has a variety of programs available. The current suite includes a word processor, a presentation maker, a database creator, a spreadsheet application, and a graphics program.
Let's take a look at each one on the list as a separate entity.
Draw
Draw is the graphics program and can be used to make charts, diagrams, and floor plans for the other applications. It supports 3D objects as well.
Base
Base is the SQL-based database application that, in addition to storing and sorting, can support other features such as mail merge.
Writer
Writer should be considered the equal of Word.
Calc
Calc is a spreadsheet application that challenges the dominance of Excel. It's my opinion that this is one of the highlights of Open Office, and I can honestly say that I believe you will love it more than Excel.
Math
If you have ever been looking at your office suite and thought, "Gee, I need to do some more differential equations or figure out the way to do complex algebra," then this is the program for you. It is cool, but I have a serious doubt that this program will be of any use to most of the users of Open Office.
Installation
This package is easy to install on just about any operating system. Just do yourself a favor, and be sure to get the desktop icons while you have the chance.
In the end, Open Office is a great choice if you want to get rid of MS Office. It has a high degree of compatibility with MS Office, and the interface is extremely intuitive. This is also a very stable system so you should have no problems with the application crashing when you try to use advanced features or paste a great deal of text.