Robert Pogson

Recently a troll prompted me to write about OpenOffice.org. I have been using it daily since 2002 with release 1.0 and I have used its precursor, StarOffice. There is a good article on Wikipedia about the history. I wish to add to that that my first download was memorable. All the servers I could find in North America were clogged, so I found one in Europe that was not. I installed my download on three machines by noon, while still doing my day job, teaching 1.0 did crash a lot… By 2.0, OO was solid and feature rich. In education, I have found the ability to produce PDF valuable. That other OS still does not have that native capability in its office suite… and they talk about interoperabity.

Objective tests of OpenOffice.org in use on real tasks can be found in a report published by the EU, Study on the Economic impact of open source software on innovation and the competitiveness of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) sector in the EU. Final Report. Nov. 20, 2006. They found that in most cases, OO was a tool of greater productivity than that other office suite.

OO is a huge application with more features than most of us will ever use. Some downloads are over 100 MB. I use it on terminal servers in schools. The huge size of it is not a problem on systems with lots of RAM. The first user to load it after reboot puts the files in RAM/cache and the next user does fewer reads/seeks from disc. That first load may take 7 seconds. The next user gets it running in 2s after a click. The moral is leave it running and you never have to worry about load time.

OO is highly configurable. I usually set up students with default configuration for English spell-checking as they type. There are all kinds of options like captialization of the first letter of a sentence. That bugs teachers a lot when they make up wordlists, but it takes only a couple of clicks to turn off that behaviour. There is abundant doucmentation from the “Help” menu and the website, OpenOffice.org at Support. I use the tutorials for some students. Most only need that for particular features like mail-merge printing, indexes or master documents. The user interface is otherwise pretty easy. Basic operations and templates cover most needs of students.

The thing that makes OO key for Linux on the desktop is that OO has a similar feature-set as the wildly more expensive product of M$. That makes Linux an excellent choice for anyone with thousands of seats in the IT system or anyone who cares about costs of installation. That would cover many businesses, schools, libraries, governments and homes. The world is full of Office documents and OO can open and modify most of them. Of course, Office 2007 is incompatible with the world with its OOXML format, but it is also incompatible with previous versions of OFFICE that cannot read OOXML. Rather than be forced to adopt new software to remain locked-in, freedom-loving people everywhere can rebel by adopting OO. This makes a lot of sense for most organisations. OFFICE 2007 is still not widespread and there is not a need for that to happen if we choose OpenOffice.org. We can always ask 2007 users to send us stuff in an earlier format.

Folks with stocks of earlier Word files may convert them with scripts such as this article describes. A few seconds per file can crank through a lot of files in one night… Once your files are converted to Open Document format, you are free of M$’s major lock-in, file formats that are incompatible with the rest of the world with each new release. On top of file-format lock-in, M$ is promoting repository lock-in with Sharepoint.

We have the good life, folks, a good OS, lots of apps, and OpenOffice.org.