CHAPTER 21 Making the Move (Bulletproof web design)
CHAPTER 21 Making the Move to OpenOffice.org You might be willing to believe that you can get a complete operating system for no cost. You might even be able to accept that this offers everything Windows does and much more. But one stumbling block many people have is in believing a Microsoft Office-compatible office suite comes as part of the zero-cost bundle. It s a step too far. Office costs hundreds of dollars are they expecting us to believe that there s a rival product that is free? Well, there is, and it s called OpenOffice.org. It comes preinstalled with Ubuntu, as well as most other Linux distributions, making it the Linux office suite of choice. It s compatible with most Microsoft Office files, too, and even looks similar and works in a comparable way, making it easy to learn. What more could you want? Office Similarities OpenOffice.org started life as a proprietary product called Star Office. Sun Microsystems bought the company behind the product and released its source code in order to encourage community development. This led to the creation of the OpenOffice.org project, a collaboration between open-source developers and Sun. This project has released several new versions of OpenOffice.org, and at the time of writing, has just released version 2. This is the version supplied with Ubuntu. Note For what it s worth, Sun still sells Star Office. This is based on the OpenOffice.org code, so it s effectively the same program. However, in addition to the office suite itself, Sun includes several useful extras such as fonts, templates, and the all-important technical support, which you can contact if you get stuck trying to undertake a particular task. OpenOffice.org features a word processor, spreadsheet program, presentation package, drawing tool (vector graphics), web site creation tool, database program, and several extras.