A Quick Look at OpenOffice.org

I guess the first question is: Have you even heard of this website before? I got introduced to it when I took an Information Systems Management class at the University of North Florida and my teacher told me about it and I decided to check it out. OpenOffice.org is a website that allows you to download a program for free that is made by a collection of members and friends of Sun Microsystems.

 The best way to describe it is a program like Microsoft Office, except free. All of the programs contained within OpenOffice are directly identical to the Microsoft programs, but with different names. Instead of Excel, there's Spreadsheet. Instead of Word, there's Text Document. To see a direct comparison of exactly how similar these programs are, I took a screenshot of both Spreadsheet and Excel.

 One of the largest benefits I think of this free open source software is the fact that you can save these files on these programs as a Microsoft Word, Excel, or however you want file type. For example, if you make an entire spreadsheet in the Spreadsheet program, you can save this file as a OpenOffice file type or as a Microsoft Excel 95, 87, or 5.0 file type so you could transfer this to an Excel program at school or work and it would work fine. Just save your file at home on your free program to a USB or flash drive and bring it with you for any possible presentation you may have or even continued work on a college campus for example.

This is a tool that a lot of people could use and has caused me to recommend it to a lot of my friends. Especially the ones who are going into college or are already in college and have maybe purchased laptops and like to work around campus instead of being couped up in a library. It is good for portable devices that do not already have Microsoft Office already paid for and installed on it.

It's a very easy to run piece of software and is good for beginners trying to learn these programs for a business, for home, or for school purposes. Knowing how Microsoft Excel works has made a lot of classes that I had like Statistics, Physics, and Econometrics become much more easier due to the system of being able to insert equations, summations, and other various systems into this Spreadsheet program. Utilizing the Text Document program has also saved me a lot of time making up projects and presentation print outs much easier. I don't often use the Presentation program to its fullest extent, but I would definitely get more involved with it if I did have to make a presentation at work and needed to piece together a viable and accurate presentation with clipart, sounds, and/or text.