I am a big fan of an office productivity suite known as StarOffice,
produced by Sun Microsystems. This program is a direct competitor to Microsoft
Office; it contains programs that are the equivalent of Microsoft Word, Excel,
PowerPoint, and more. StarOffice can even read and write files used by Word,
Excel and PowerPoint. Best of all is its price; instead of $479 per copy or
more that Microsoft charges for Office, StarOffice has been free. I have written
about StarOffice several times, you can read my comments in three Ancestry.com
locations: here,
here,
and here.
Now StarOffice has branched into two programs. The name StarOffice
is retained by Sun Microsystems, and the program will soon become commercial.
That is, Sun Microsystems will soon begin charging for support of the program.
The second program is OpenOffice.org. OpenOffice.org is a non-profit group of
programmers that has just released its version of the program. The program’s
name is the same as that of the organization: OpenOffice.org. The new program
is based on the same code as StarOffice. In other words, the two programs are
almost identical right now but will become different in the future as the two
groups independently add new features to their productivity suites. OpenOfficed.org
will remain free of charge.
OpenOffice.org 1.0 includes a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation
graphics and other applications. It is the result of 18 months of collaboration
between Sun developers and more than 10,000 volunteer developers, a venture
that began when Sun donated the StarOffice code to the open-source or "free
software" community.
OpenOffice.org is an excellent set of programs, nearly as powerful
as the $479 offering from Microsoft. I find it easy to use as well. OpenOffice
1.0 is available now for Microsoft Windows, Linux and Solaris. A Macintosh version
is promised to be available later this year.
You can read an excellent review of OpenOffice.org
and download the free
software.
Dick Eastman Online
