Report on Open Office (www.openoffice.org)
OpenOffice. org is a site which serves as a platform for users around the globe to download Open Office. Open Office is a free and open source office productivity suite. It offers different applications in a suite format, just like Microsoft Office (MS Office), which can be used to prepare formatted text documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Open Office has strong inspiration from massively popular MS Office, which is considered by many to be industry standard for office productivity applications.
But at the same time, OpenOffice. org is unique not only because it is free but it is an open source project for everyone to benefit from and also support its development. Open Office was established initially as “Star Office” or “StarOffice” by StarDivision, a company incorporated in Germany in 1980s, which was later acquired by Sun Microsystems in 1999. The original source code was developed by StarDivision itself.
Sun Microsystems invested in this venture with the vision to provide a free alternative to MS Office and break the monopoly and market share dominance of Microsoft Office in office productivity applications. After Sun’s acquisition by Oracle, OpenOffice. org is now being managed and run by Oracle with contributions coming from Novell, RedHat, RedFlag CH2000, and IBM. As per the site (www. openoffice. org), today more than 450,000 individuals from around the globe have contributed or continue to contribute in this project.
The creators of this open source, free application suite created their own Graphic User Interface but kept it close to MS Office in terms of usability so as to gain acceptance of users who were otherwise quite well conversed with MS Office across the world. OpenOffice. org has developed a strong training and support section which offers users easily accessible information to train them on OpenOffice. org. Taking ahead the spirit of it being an open source program, OpenOffice. org welcomes everyone to contribute to this project on continual basis.
Its different communities and pages are decidcated for interaction with developers around the world who keep on working to report issues and fix them as well. OpenOffice. org is an ideal office productivity suite for small businesses owing to the fact that it is available free of cost and has strong comparability with MS Office, which professionals find convenient to use. Today, OpenOffice. org offers not only Word Processor, Spreadsheet and Presentation program but also Database program, Calculator and Drawing platform. All of these require little or no training.
For large organizations, OpenOffice. org can be used in general day-to-day official work but for critical works or works requiring rich features offered by latest versions of MS Office, a limited number of licenses can be purchased. Since there is no issue of compatibility between OpenOffice. org and MS Office, so this will help control costs of Office Productivity suite even for large organizations. Thus, it is recommended for all kinds of organizations, big or small, to use this solution and make use of its compatibility feature and it being free of cost and reduce their operational costs.
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