OpenOffice.org (also known as OOo)

Free open source alternative to MS Office, includes Writer for text documents, Calc for spreadsheets, Impress for presentations, Base for databases, Draw for vector graphics and Math for setting formulas.

OpenOffice3 is now available in beta form and trials so far have shown it to be quicker at most tasks, especially getting started in the first place! There is support for Office2007 documents too. For anyone who likes the idea of saving as a pdf, including drawings in a document without having to figure out what to do with Word's Drawing Window or is coming to the end of the 60-day trial that came with their new computer and either doesn't fancy laying out £600 for the full pack or isn't entitled to the £30 or so student deal then this has to be a good choice.

Some tasks that are simple in Word, like formatting page numbers or having different headers for sections of a long document, can be a bit of a challenge (the latter still eluding me!) but I think most people will be more than content with the products. I'd love to hear from users of the other elements of the suite sometime.

Like other open source projects, there are many variants of OpenOffice.org available, such as:

• StarOffice, a commercial package from Sun Microsystems, Inc.,
• OOo Novell Edition, enhanced version by Novell, Inc.
• Go-OO.org edition, enhanced edition that includes features that did not yet make it into the main code base
• NeoOffice, a version for Mac OS X, integrating better with the MAC UI interface and does not require the X11 package to be installed.
• Lotus Symphony, IBM's office suite, rerelased in 2007 based on OOo and still in beta (as of end of 2007).

Open Office is a great alternative, because it supports ISO 26300 (also known as OpenDocument Format "ODF") as its native file format. It also is available in 170+ languages and does support Windows, Mac OS X and Linux platforms. As a matter of fact it is actually bundled with almost all Linux distributions available.

Open Office is easy to learn, with plenty of documentation, books and technical support for non-technical users available.

Information above added by an organisation called Conficio who appear to run a support service for OpenOffice but links on their site to various examples were not working so I have removed some of them for the time being. I should ask again that people editing these pages please add their name and contact address. We're trying to keep this independent and want visitors to trust the advice or suggestions we give as being, at least, something that practitioners have actually tried.

Andrew [owner]

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