Imagine one day your computer registry messes up, you format your PC only to find that you don’t have MS Powerpoint to prepare your presentations. Most of us would scream, curse Microsoft for making MS Office so unaffordable (especially for us students) and search frantically for someone with the software (or download a cracked version). What if you couldn’t find that someone? This was my situation until I found OpenOffice.
You can say OpenOffice is a “free” version of MS Office with softwares that substitute the whole package. E.g: OpenOffice Impress vs MS Powerpoint, OpenOffice Writer vs MS Word, OpenOffice Calc vs MS Excel. Before I go into the features of the software, let me tell you the BIGGEST plus point for any user of OpenOffice. You can open your MS Office-produced files in OpenOffice, edit them, and save them back in the original MS Office versions.
Friend sends you MS Powerpoint doc, you open with OpenOffice Impress, edit edit edit, save as MS Powerpoint format, send back to friend. Voila!
If you’re worried about runs in formatting and alignment, I haven’t experienced any so far when opening the files edited in MS Office. However, I did find some very negligible alignment runs when I opened some MS Powerpoint files in Impress.
Features….
I’m going to take a different approach to talking about the features this time; the simple and fast Q&A approach.
1. What if my computer freezes half way as I’m working on a file?
- No worries, Open Office has the file recovery function as well. 
2. Are OpenOffice Impress slide templates nice?
- To tell you the truth, they are SUPER ugly! BUT, you can always find numerous templates made specially for OpenOffice on the web. You can even use MS Powerpoint templates or design your own slides. 
Some slides I made for a class presentation! Template downloaded online.
3. Does it have bugs? Will the bugs drive me nuts?
So far I have not encountered any problems with OpenOffice Writer/Calc (Word/Excel) other than the fonts looking a bit weird sometimes. To fix this, you just scroll up/down and everything will be back to normal. By the way, this screen refresh problem happens occasionally in MS Office as well.
OpenOffice Impress (Powerpoint) on the other hand have a few bugs which require a bit of creativity to overcome. These bugs are those pertaining to the textboxes used in slides. Sometimes when you resize the textbox (e.g: Lessen its width), the text paragraphing doesn’t change accordingly to fit into the new size. Also, if you have a resized image in your slide, sometimes during the slideshow the image will be shown as “un-resized”. However, it only took me a few minutes to find a way to go around these bugs. The textbox problem can be fixed by drawing a new resizable textbox. As for the slideshow, all you have to do is go to the previous slide and come back to the current slide.
And no, the bugs won’t drive you nuts!
4. What about features? Are they similar?? Will I be able to find them?
Yes, using OpenOffice is VERY similar to MS Office. I’d say its an almost seamless transtion. The control panel, tool bars, placement of functions and shortcut keys are very alike. In fact, my friend borrowed my laptop for his presentation and didn’t even realize it was not MS Powerpoint.
Some of us will like the additional functions they added to the tool bar and menus for ease of navigation.
5. Will I be able to live without MS Office?
Of course! I’ve been using it to write proposals, essays, prepare presentations and spreadsheets for almost a month. None of my teammates or professors know that I didn’t prepare them in MS Office. ^_~
6. The conclusion?
The bugs are negligible. The functionality is there. It is reliable and stable. If you’re tired of expensive MS Office packages, get OpenOffice.
As OpenOffice is open source, I’m looking forward to helping them fix the bugs I encountered one of these days, probably when my programming skills are good enough hah! I’m starting to appreciate Open Source Software(OSS) more as I begin to discover new substitutes for expensive, commercialized programs.
I will always love Adobe though! The day OSS will match them is still far to come.
Resources:
Open Office Official website
SourceForge.net – Largest database of open source software
Open Source Initiative – More about the Open Source Community
Recent Comments