OpenOffice – your open source for MS Office option

OpenOffice is one of the freeware software around that is also open source. It is a good replacement for the good old MS Office. Both OpenOffice and MS Office serve more or less the same features.

The Similarities

Text editor like ‘Word’, ‘Powerpoint’ to make professional presentations, ‘Excel’ spreadsheets along with the formulae to help you carry out complex mathematical operations.

The good thing about OpenOffice is that it is entirely free. You don't have to pay a dime to get it. Secondly, it is easily available to download it from the web. Just Google it and you are done.

OpenOffice	Microsoft Office	Functions
Writer	MS Word	Carries out the text editing fuctions
Impress	Powerpoint	Creates slides and presentations
Calc	Excel	Carries out Excel fuctions
Draw	Publisher	Synonymous with Desktop Publishing

In Other Words
What MS Word is to MS Office, Writer is to OpenOffice. The way you can make, arrange and give effects to slides and make presentations through PowerPoint, you can work equally efficiently in Impress. Calc and Excel are almost the same in both the suites and when it comes to desktop publishing then there is similarities between Draw and Publisher.

Apart from this, as there are options for you to choose options in the Office Suite for custom installation, you will find the same in OpenOffice.


However, in spite of all these similarities, there is a difference between OpenOffice and MS Office. Or in fact let us say, Microsoft showed why they are better yet. In MS Word you have the options of working with the .docx and .doc formats. However, in OpenOffice, there are only the .docx files at your disposal.