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.

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What is Open Source Software?

Open Source Software is both a movement and a development paradigm. The concept permits the collaboration of many different programmers in potentially many different geographic locations to contribute to a software package. The programming code (or source code) is made available to the general public or purchaser to allow them to make their own modifications as they see fit. This allows complete or nearly complete software to be customized for specific needs.

This contrasts the Closed Source model where a single company hires programmers, generally in a centralized location, to develop proprietary code that is never released to the public and therefore cannot be modified or customized.

Examples of Open Sources Software versus Closed Source or Proprietary Software are;

What are the benefits of Open Source Software?

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