Here at ProfHacker we talk a lot about Google Docs and other Google tools, myself included. But I also have two other office suites installed on my primary machine—Microsoft Office and OpenOffice. On my netbook, I only have OpenOffice. I’ve had some version or another of OpenOffice on at least one of my machines since 2000. Although I keep Microsoft Office around on the primary machine, I can certainly envision a time (perhaps with the next machine) when I don’t have it installed at all. Why? Simply put, there’s nothing that I do with an office suite that I can’t do with OpenOffice, and OpenOffice is free and open source.
I’m not alone. A few hours ago, unrelated to the creation of this post, ProfHacker writer Nels Highberg tweeted a similar sentiment. The OpenOffice suite contains six different programs:
- Base: for relational databases (coming from Microsoft land? You can import and work with Access databases in Base)
- Calc: for spreadsheets (coming from Microsoft land? You can import and work with Excel spreadsheets in Calc)
- Draw: for vector graphics
- Impress: for slide shows/presentations (coming from Microsoft land? You can import and work with PowerPoint presentations in Impress)
- Math: a mathematical equation editor
- Writer: for word processing (coming from Microsoft land? You can import and work with Word documents in Writer)
The user interfaces for all of the OpenOffice products look very similar to the interfaces one would see in Microsoft Office. As much as I love Google Docs (and I do), one of the issues I faced when implementing Google Docs in the classroom was the inability of most students to format or spellcheck their document because the tools weren’t in the same place and they couldn’t make the leap about how to go about looking for them (note that these are the students’ own problems, not Google’s, as far as I’m concerned). OpenOffice isn’t a clone of Microsoft Office, but it does look more like what people are used to seeing in desktop application.
OpenOffice Writer
OpenOffice Impress
OpenOffice Calc
The first image is of a new document started in OpenOffice Writer. The second image is of a slide in OpenOffice Impress—and as with PowerPoint you can import charts, graphs, and other objects from the rest of the office suite (and beyond). The third image is of a spreadsheet in OpenOffice Calc—this particular spreadsheet is my gradebook, saved in Microsoft Excel 2007 (XLSX format), imported perfectly (formulas and all) into Calc. The import/export options within the OpenOffice suite are numerous—it will often open files that Microsoft Office has issues with, for instance, which is helpful when students send papers saved in an antiquated word processing format.
I realize that academic pricing allows students (and teachers) to pick up Microsoft Office for less than a hundred bucks, and that Microsoft Office has some programs that OpenOffice does not. However, if you’re looking for an office suite that is free, open, and cross-platform, and gives you the ability to create documents, spreadsheets, presentations, vector graphics, and databases, consider OpenOffice. Download it and try it out—especially if you’re facing the need to upgrade your office suite and you’d rather save that hundred (or a few hundred) bucks.
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37 Responses to Considering OpenOffice? You Should.
Kathleen Fitzpatrick - November 24, 2009 at 6:44 pm
I abandoned Microsoft Office over 18 months ago, and have never looked back. What I’d really like to hear somebody talk about, though, is the relative merits of OpenOffice and NeoOffice (a port of OpenOffice to Mac OS X). NeoOffice stems from the period when OpenOffice wouldn’t run natively on the Mac, but it does now, of course. I find that NeoOffice and OpenOffice treat documents just slightly differently — they have different conventions for font naming, for instance — but I don’t have a clear sense of the benefits of either, other than look and feel…
Julie Meloni - November 24, 2009 at 7:23 pm
Tom, have you confirmed those two issues on a non-Linux machine? Because both those things you mentioned w/ Office 2007 files haven’t happened to me in the Windows version of OpenOffice 3.1. Quite the contrary, in fact, as I was pleasantly surprised at the way in which all my formatting and formulas were preserved from .xlsx imports. (Note: please don’t read that as “neener neener just switch to Windows” because that is absolutely not what I’m about at all. Far from it. I just want to present the most informative picture for people reading these comments.)
Julie Meloni - November 24, 2009 at 6:55 pm
That would indeed make a good post — hopefully one of our Mac-based writers (everyone except myself and I think two others) will take up the challenge!
Tom Burkholder - November 24, 2009 at 7:01 pm
Since I use Linux almost exclusively, OpenOffiice is one of the few options for me and I’ve been using it since it was Star Office 5. I also make extensive use of the equation editor and find it much faster than the Microsoft equation editor. There are some drawbacks, namely OpenOffice 3.1 does not import graphs in Word 2007 .docx files and reads .xlsx files poorly.
Julie Meloni - November 24, 2009 at 8:16 pm
Google Docs will import the following (this is all their text):
Documents (up to 500KB of text)
* HTML files and plain text (.txt).
* Microsoft Word (.doc, .docx), Rich Text (.rtf), OpenDocument Text (.odt) and StarOffice (.sxw).
Presentations (up to 10MB)
* Microsoft PowerPoint (.ppt, .pps).
Spreadsheets (up to 1MB)
* Comma Separated Value (.csv).
* Microsoft Excel (.xls, .xlsx) files and OpenDocument Spreadsheet (.ods).
With the caveat: “Some features may not be fully supported when files are converted, such as footnotes, tables of contents, tracked changes and comments, embedded graphs, pivot tables, and slide animations.”
Once in Google Docs, a document can be exported in native OpenDocument format (also HTML, PDF, Word, RTF, Text).
Bill Guinee - November 24, 2009 at 8:10 pm
Your article talks at length about the ability to import Microsoft Office files into Open Office. Can one move files easily between Google Docs and Open Office? There are times when I need the collaborative/sharing features of Google Docs.
Ted Major - November 24, 2009 at 9:31 pm
There is, however, one major bug with the current version of Open Office. When saving a word processor document with tables to .doc format, Open Office corrupts the tables and often deletes the table contents. My institution has a standard syllabus format (with tables), and requires submission of all course syllabi in word format, so this bug really caused me some grief at the beginning of the semester.
John - November 24, 2009 at 9:57 pm
As a Mac guy, I have tried to abandon MS Office as well and even though I cannot say I have totally left, I can say I have not paid for MS Office in over five years (relax -I have a legal copy of Office 2003). I have used Apple iWork quite a bit and NeoOffice. OpenOffice for Mac is too much like a Windows Program for me and since I prefer the interface of native Mac apps, NeoOffice is the better free Office alternative. iWork is $70 and does take some getting used to if you switch. I also use NeoOffice as my primary conversion tool since it reads MsWorks and Wordperfect (yes I have students who cannot understand the “save as RTF” instructions).
As for Google Docs and Zoho Writer, I love the ability to share and collaborate. I personally find the Zoho Writer to be a better word processor (especially if coming from MS Office), but I trust Google more. The interface of Zoho Writer is more robust and requires much less clicks than Google Docs.
Since much of my writing these days is going to the web, I am currently using NaNoWroMo to test drive Scriviner (Mac only). It is text-format based and set up for writing long documents, but it has gotten me back to concentrating on the content and not the format. I am then using Apple Pages (iWork) to format the text.
BTW: I’m a microbiologist. Not sure if that is important here, but thought I would put it in anyway.
Leslie Jo - November 24, 2009 at 11:25 pm
At the start of this semester, I had to wipe and reinstall my MacG4. I went to Open Office since I did not any more have access to the MS Office disks I’d had originally. I’ve been more than happy with the functionality. And, a telling detail to me is that I can now open .docx documents (no, my students don’t understand my .RTF instructions either). I couldn’t open them with my old version of Word.
Jason - November 27, 2009 at 9:49 pm
Thomas, as a general rule ProfHacker posts don’t advocate switching anything. Instead, the model is: “If you find yourself in this position, you might try X.” As William says, if you don’t find yourself in that position–in this case, if you’re happy with Microsoft Office–then there’s no need to try OpenOffice.
George H. Williams - November 27, 2009 at 9:54 pm
Thomas, as editor and co-founder of ProfHacker, I’m requesting that in future comments you avoid the kind of tone evident in your participation so far in this thread. No one is arguing for everyone to stop using Microsoft Office and start using OpenOffice, but you seem to be itching to argue with somebody about that. Please stop. If you’re happy with MS Office, that’s great. Some people like to use OpenOffice instead of or in addition to MS Office. That’s all that’s being said here.
You’ve had your say. Now let it go.
Thomas - November 27, 2009 at 7:34 pm
I haven’t seen any technologically interesting reasons to switch advocated in the post or the comments. Disliking Microsoft and liking open source seems to be the main theme.
William Patrick Wend - November 27, 2009 at 8:11 pm
Should there have to be any bigger reason than liking open source? If you’re fine with MS Office, then stick with it.
KF - November 25, 2009 at 11:10 am
When I dumped MS Office, I originally switched to iWork, which I still very much like to work in; Keynote remains my slide builder of choice. But Pages has some serious limitations as a Word-replacement, most notably in the ways it handles footnotes and endnotes; Apple has apparently not fully implemented the RTF standard, so importing and exporting complexly formatted documents created a number of glitches.
It was this summer, as I was finishing the draft of my book manuscript (and hence had serious need for stable footnotes and endnotes!), that I made the switch to NeoOffice, and it’s turned out just to be simpler to do almost everything there.
(I’m a huge Scrivener fan, too, though I’ve used it mostly for the getting-started phases of a project.)
Nels P. Highberg - November 28, 2009 at 5:06 pm
I have to agree that wanting to encourage the Open Source Movement is enough of a reason to choose open source software. For me, though, it also comes down to money. It’s true that Microsoft Office does not cost a huge amount of money if you use the educational discount, but it still costs some money. And if you add up all the different programs we use from Microsoft and Adobe and the other corporations–the ones that cost $19.99, the ones that cost $49.99, and the the ones that cost $99.99 and so on–they can add up very quickly. When you replace computers or work across systems, that can really add up. I work on a Mac in my office and at home, but I use a PC as my netbook, which is my primary travel computer. Working across platforms can mean spending more money. For me, it’s worth investigating all alternatives, which is why I’m often asking about such alternatives in these comment threads. I don’t want to spend $19.99 let alone $199.99 if there is an open source alternative. I may decide that spending the $19,99 is a better move than donating ten bucks to the open source gang, but I want to be the one making that choice.
My basic point is that what seems like a little money to one person can seem like a lot to another because we all live and work in our own economic contexts. And if there are free or cheaper versions out there, I want to know about them so I can make more informed choices.
William Patrick Wend - November 28, 2009 at 5:39 pm
How is anyone discouraging debate? Everyone on this thread has been discussing their personal preferences and needs (and OS situations: we have commenters here using Windows, Mac, and various blends of Linux). I even said that if MS Office works for you, then use it! In fact, if you look at other comments you’ll see debate and questions about different aspects of OO and MS Office.
I don’t see where anyone is saying you should advocate for an MS product over Open Source. I could go on for pages about that, but this isn’t the appropriate place or time. Especially given the different situations everyone has and reasons for using what they do.
William Patrick Wend - November 28, 2009 at 5:40 pm
You can do this natively in OpenOffice as well.
William Patrick Wend - November 26, 2009 at 1:27 pm
I have used OpenOffice exclusively since 2004 and never looked back. As a Linux user it is the best solution (besides Google Docs) out there. I have had problems in the past with conversion of files from Mac users to me. A few of my students have had this issue (Macs), but their solution has been to send me a PDF of their paper. I can annotate that just as easily as a .doc or .odt
I am pleased by how many of my students also use OO, whether for economical reasons or a desire to embrace Non-Microsoft products.
Nels P. Highberg - November 25, 2009 at 3:45 pm
Adding a comment to say that maybe my problem is that I move between PC and Mac? And NeoOffice is only for Mac? I’m primarily a Mac user, but my Netbook is PC, and I do too much work on it to stick to Mac-only software. Ugh, this is so frustrating.
Julie Meloni - November 25, 2009 at 4:06 pm
Nels, you’re not allowed to rescind your comment because I used a screenshot of it in this post. (just kidding, of course)
To some extent, there have to be some expectations that documents opened in OpenOffice (or NeoOffice, or Scrivener, or Pages, or Google Docs, or AbiWord, etc) that weren’t native to that software are going to look wonky if the author of the original document used formatting that is specific to that program and saved it in that program’s format rather than something like RTF, which would get closer to an interoperable format. In other words, if a word processor is being used as a layout tool, I would expect that layout to go crazy when viewed in another word processing program. But standard documents — and in that I’m including reports with charts and graphs, essays with footnotes and endnotes, syllabi with tables, and resumes with reasonable design elements — have always looked pretty similar to me. (then again, see my comment upthread about never having seen a blue screen of death, either).
Honestly, if I were reviewing documents for/with design qualities, and I didn’t specify the format in which those documents have to appear (IOW, if it’s not a class on creating documents with a specific tool such as InDesign or some such), I would ask for those documents in PDF. Yes, I realize that’s the anti-open way, but I want to see design, I want to be sure to see the design that was intended. This is a tangent that raises other issues, so I’ll stop now, but my point related to OpenOffice (or insert other office suite) is this: it, like other software of its ilk, is not a clone of something else. There will be issues in conversion, unique to the type of documents being converted. Do I wish that software were all perfectly interoperable — and adhered to existing standards so that interoperability could truly exist? Heck yes. Unfortunately….well, you know the rest.
Everyone should use what works for them.
Nels P. Highberg - November 25, 2009 at 5:07 pm
I converted her report to RTF myself to see if it opened more easily in OpenOffice, and that just led to a different set of formatting problems. Oh, well, I was hoping it would be easier than this. I’m trying to find a way to work across PC and Mac without spending money or software for both platforms, but that doesn’t seem possible. When I have students working in InDesign or Illustrator, I do have them convert to PDF before they send it to me, but I tend to email grades/comments rather than annotate the PDFs.
So, that leads to two questions that are out of the range of this post and might work better in a separate PH post. First, how can a student convert a document to PDF when she/he is on a PC without Adobe Acrobat. Is GoogleDocs it?
Second, how can I annotate PDF text offline on my netbook (say when I’m on the train to NYC)? It’s simple on a Mac with Preview, and it’s simply on my old PC because I have Adobe Acrobat, but I got nothin’ on the netbook. I guess I could try the offline version of GoogleDocs and she how they handle track changes and comments/notes.
I don’t want to be a Microsoft Office person. I really don’t. But it seems like it’s the only option for working on both Mac and PC when I spend a fair amount of my grading time not connected to internet. And since I’m teaching advanced professional writing courses that require particular uses of images, formatting, and the like. So sad.
Julie Meloni - November 25, 2009 at 5:14 pm
First, how can a student convert a document to PDF when she/he is on a PC without Adobe Acrobat. Is GoogleDocs it?
Oooh oohh! I know this one! First, I wouldn’t go native doc format to Google Docs to output to PDF because that would introduce the same sorts of formatting issues. For the PC, there are p-l-e-n-t-y of free PDF converters (actually, printer drivers because that’s what PDF is – the output of a print process, rather than a save-as deal, despite what people think). The one I personally recommend is DoPDF (http://www.dopdf.com/) although there are many others; adding a printer driver in this manner ensures ability to output as PDF regardless of the software program (IOW, not limited to Word). There are also online PDF converters (in case the student isn’t using their own machine or can’t install software on lab machines), and there is also the free component of Acrobat.com.
But yeah, there are plenty of related issues here that would be good topics for future PH posts.
[kind of related: in my work I see a lot of issues with designed documents when viewed in the same program (with which they were created) on different platforms. so, it's not even as simple as a program-to-program conversion difference.]
Julie Meloni - November 25, 2009 at 7:36 pm
(agreed, and when those PDFs are created, students should embed the fonts too)
Nels P. Highberg - November 25, 2009 at 3:42 pm
I think I’m going to have to rescind my comment about going to OpenOffice as my primary program. I was just trying to grade a report that a student wrote in Word, and the formatting was disastrous. The table of contents was screwed up, and her spacing between sections was bizarre. I opened it up in Word, and all of that was perfect. Somehow, opening it up in OpenOffice wrecked havoc with the formatting, and formatting is a major part of the grade since this is an upper-level professional writing class in report and proposal writing.
This makes me sad because I was looking forward to doing more grading on my train rides to New York City, but the conversion problems were pretty egregious. I did receive some comments to my tweet alerting me to problems converting documents with particular kinds of formatting issues. Now I’m thinking I need to buy Microsoft Office for the Netbook if I want to grade projects from my advanced professional writing courses.
Is there something I’m missing about the conversion process that would make this easier? I really wanted to make OpenOffice my primary suite, but that may not be possible. I mean, her formatting was absolutely horrid in OO but perfect in MW.
Julie Meloni - November 25, 2009 at 11:15 am
Hm. That’s never happened to me either (my syllabus uses tables too).
Then again, I haven’t seen a blue screen of death on any of my Windows machines since pre-2000, so perhaps I just have a protective shield around all my computing gear that makes everything work perfectly and thus not be as useful for others. Sorry!
Thomas - November 25, 2009 at 12:53 pm
MSOffice is a great product, and I see no reason to abandon it. As a college prof or student, you can buy it for peanuts, and not have to bother with file transfers and incompatibilities, or lack of features. At my job, I can get Office 2007 for home use for $20, and of course it comes installed for free on my work computers. Why would I want to switch? If I had to pay $100, then maybe I’d considering switching….
Thomas - November 25, 2009 at 12:53 pm
There is a free add-on for Office 2003 that allows you to open docx. It’s really not a big deal.
Julie Meloni - November 25, 2009 at 1:03 pm
Thomas, that’s great that MS Office works for you and you see no reason to abandon it. This post is about an alternative that many people have taken advantage of, for reasons stated throughout the post and the comments to it.
Nels P. Highberg - November 25, 2009 at 10:15 pm
Formatting is always important to me, but I teach in a professional writing program, though, so that’s sometimes as important as content. I’ve never had a problem, though, until I tried working in programs other than Word, like OpenOffice. Which actually means I never had a problem until this afternoon.
That said, if anyone can point me to a program other than Adobe Acrobat that will allow me to annotate PDFs as I’m grading them on a PC, I’d love to know about it. Preview makes it simple on a Mac, but I’m looking for something for my netbook. Googling is just confusing me more.
Or, since I’m teaching complicated formats and document design, maybe I should just stick with Microsoft Office. I just like the idea of open-source programming.
George H. Williams - November 28, 2009 at 6:34 pm
Thomas, you need to let it go. Seriously. If you’re incapable of seeing how your comments are not in keeping with the mission of this site, then I suggest you stick to just reading the site for awhile until you understand more fully.
Nels P. Highberg - November 28, 2009 at 6:57 pm
Thomas, I can only speak for myself, but I’m not seeing how the tone of your posts is encouraging debate or dialogue. For example, when you wrote, “There is a free add-on for Office 2003 that allows you to open docx. It’s really not a big deal,” I did not read that as extending the conversation. The last sentence felt dismissive. Saying, “I haven’t seen any technologically interesting reasons to switch advocated in the post or the comments” also feels dismissive. If you had expanded by explaining what would be technologically interesting to you, that would be extending the conversation and adding to it. But the tone and style of that line feels like a conversation stopper.
You’ll see that many of us in these threads often try to be explicit that we’re speaking only about our experiences and our needs. And many of us try to write things in a way that will enable others to jump in and speak for themselves.
Thomas - November 28, 2009 at 5:23 pm
I assumed that a discussion of the relative merits of competing programs would be a core mission in this type of thread, especially since that’s the format of the original post. My tone has been entirely collegial, unless one considers expressing an opinion to be bad form.
But given the responses to my two posts, it’s apparent that I’ve deeply misunderestimated the culture in this blog, and I’m not exactly sure how. Is it that debates or advocacy in general are discouraged? Or did I blow it by advocating an MS product over an OS product?
Nicole Wyatt - November 25, 2009 at 7:32 pm
First, how can a student convert a document to PDF when she/he is on a PC without Adobe Acrobat. Is GoogleDocs it?
If she is using Office 2007 then she can install an add in from Microsoft and save directly to pdf.
Get it here
No, I don’t know why this isn’t part of the shipped product.
Nicole Wyatt - November 25, 2009 at 7:34 pm
Also, if formatting is an issue then in my opinion you really do need to request pdfs — even when no conversion or platform change is involved something as simple as not having the right fonts can mess the whole thing up.
Julie Meloni - November 26, 2009 at 4:15 am
PDF-XChange Viewer (free version) for Win 2K & Vista (so no XP, if XP is on your netbook).
FoxIt 3.1 for XP & higher, but it’s $39 (which isn’t $300, to be sure!)
dr_murkes - December 2, 2009 at 9:28 am
I also recommend using the writers’ tools extension. http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/project/writertools … which let’s you email backups of your current document with a few clicks, among other things …
Eric Luper - December 2, 2009 at 5:23 pm
What do you use to replace Outlook? I need that (at least I think I do) for my Blackberry to interface. Admittedly, I’m not very good at all this stuff!! Help!