Open Office is an Open Source suite of applications that can be used as a replacement for Microsoft Office or Corel Office. Open Office has a few endearing qualities that make it ideal for use in ministry, both in an administrative and missionary environment. The advantages and disadvantages follow;

Advantages;

1. It’s Free - That’s correct! Open Office’s primary advantage is the cost. It only costs the time to download and install the program.
2. It can open files created with Microsoft Office and Corel Office. That includes word processing documents created with Word and WordPerfect; presentation documents created with PowerPoint and Impress; not to mention spreadsheets created with Excel and StarCalc.
3. It can save documents in the aforementioned formats with multiple version support too. All testing I’ve done indicates that if you save a document with Open Office in say Microsoft Word format and you send that document to someone who only has Microsoft Office, they’ll be able to open it 99% of the time.
4. It also offers it’s own database creator as well.
5. Open Office is available to run on Windows, MAC and Linux operating systems.
6. It’s Open Source and actively developed. That means new features and compatibility is constantly being added to the suite of programs.
7. It’s easy to learn how to use.

Disadvantages;

1. Some of the menus are different in the respected applications. This requires a minor learning curve.
2. Not all documents created with Microsoft Office or Corel Office can be opened by Open Office applications. I’ve experienced difficulty opening very few documents, but it has happened. I’d say 95% of the documents I’ve tried, that were created with Microsoft or Corel Office, can be read and used in Open Office.
3. Files created with Microsoft Access cannot be opened with Open Office’s Database application.
4. Outlook or an equivalent is not included.

Everyone will need to determine there own needs based on features available in the respective Office Application Suites. I use Open Office exclusively and have found it to be stable, flexible and capable of fulfilling my needs. I highly recommend that you download it and give a try. If for no other reason than to have an alternative to the office suite you currently use. It’s free and will only require the time to download, install the program and a little time to “figure-out” where they put the menus you use most frequently.

To download Open Office go to http://www.openoffice.org/ and follow the instructions.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 14th, 2006 at 1:26 pm by admin and is filed under Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.