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Post by Bret Walker on Feb 17, 2005 11:51:35 GMT -5
www.openoffice.orgOpenOffice.org (the official name, although I just call it OpenOffice) is the new open source office suite from Sun Microsystems, and the antecedant to Star Office. I tried Star Office years ago, when it came out for free and open source, and found it to be slow and clunky, certainly not a viable option to Microsoft Office. One thing you could do with Star Office, though, was open Microsoft-based documents and manipulate them. Still, it was a desktop-integrated product and I never really liked the interface. OpenOffice is a completely different animal. It's much sleeker than its predecessor, a lot faster and easier to use. The auto-pilots (think: Wizards) actually CREATE templates based on your inputs, and the resulting templates can be used to create new docs. It's awesome. PLUS there's the functionality to export documents into PDF files. I've only been using it maybe 24 hours, but I'm very impressed with it so far. My only complaint is that there's no integrated email client like Outlook, although the email client in Star Office was very difficult to figure out. If you get a chance, download this FREE office suite and check it out. (You might want to install the latest Java Runtime Environment first, since OpenOffice uses Java for a lot of its functions) I give it out of 5
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