Open Office as an alternative to MS Office

May 14, 2008

Most of you would have by now heard about the free open source office application Open Office provided by openoffice.org. Open Office is also commonly referred to as OO.o or OOo and has certainly proved to be a very handy open source application. The name OpenOffice has a nice little history. It was originally derived from a software called StarOffice which was an office suite developed by a startup firm by name StarDivision. In 1999, StarDivision was acquired and merged with Sun Microsystems in the month of August. Sun Microsystems, in an effort to reduce the ever growing market share of Microsoft Office developed by billionaire Bill Gates’ Microsoft Corp, decided to provide a free alternative which did not compromise in quality or functionality when compared to Microsoft Office.

I’ve been using Open Office for personal as well as business purpose for the last couple of years and have found it as good as, if not better than Microsoft Office. Best of all, it comes free being released under the open source GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). As time goes by, Open Office is likely to be developed further and will have many new, exciting and powerful features. This will provide Microsoft a run for its money. Looks like open source is the way to go.

Posted in Windows Applications