The Open Learning Centre

The Open Source application suite OpenOffice.org was "born" out of a product called Star Office. StarDivision, the original author of the StarOffice suite of software, was founded in Germany in the mid-1980s. It was acquired by Sun Microsystems during the summer of 1999 and StarOffice 5.2 was released in June of 2000. Sun continues to sponsor development on OpenOffice.org and is the primary contributor of code to OpenOffice.org.

OpenOffice.org is released under the LGPL license which is a true Open Source license. You have the right to copy, modify and redistribute the software as long as the source code is also provided.

At the last estimate there are over 100,000,000 (one hundred million) users of OpenOffice.org. It can be freely downloaded from their website and it also is distributed with most major Linux distribution. Once you have a single copy of it, you are free to duplicate it to every machine you have in your company, give to friends and family and anyone else you think should have it.

Usage in business is increasing rapidly and major adoptions are taking place in large enterprises and public bodies too. There is a Wiki page dedicated to recording significant deployments of OpenOffice.org around the world. Visit it here: http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/ ...

Here are a few very good reasons:

• It doesn't cost anything. Nor will it in the future, including any upgrades.
• You can install OpenOffice.org on Windows^tm, Linux^tm, Solaris^tm, Apple's Mac OSX^tm and BSD.
• OpenOffice.org uses a public and ISO approved International Open standard for document storage called odf (Open Document Format). This means you will ALWAYS be able to get access to your documents. Other proprietary Office Applications use closed document formats and you are generally forced to upgrade or convert your documents to continue to have access to them.
• It is a fully functional office suite. Word Processor, Spreadsheet, Presentation, Drawing, Maths Equation editor, and Database functionality are all included in the standard, free, package.
• All OpenOffice.org applications have a simple "save as PDF" button on the toolbar making it easy to create portable documents for electronic distribution.

Yes. With OpenOffice.org you can open Word, Excel and Powerpoint documents. Sometimes documents with very complex formatting need a little fixing after they are opened, but this happens between different versions of Microsoft Office too. We have seen some very complex Powerpoint presentations that would not open in Microsoft Office (even though that is what created them) but opened perfectly in OpenOffice.org. Calc, the spreadsheet component supports the full range of functions and formulas which could appear in cells, but macros written in VBA would probably need to be rewritten in the OpenOffice.org macro language (which is quite similar to VBA). If you have been using Microsoft Office 2003 or earlier then the menu options in OpenOffice.org will seem more familiar to you than those of Microsoft Office 2007.