Saturday 15 September 2012

Open Office: Best MS Office Alternative

MS office has been an important part of our Windows PC since a long time. Whenever we write a document, we use Word, we make slide-shows with PowerPoint, and so on. But with the increasing number of similar products available in the market, we get many alternatives to the standard MS Office. Also, many open source software are available nowadays. One such open source software is 'Open Office'.

Open Office: Alternative to MS Office

Alternative path
Image courtesy of Stuart Miles/FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Open Office is an open source software, means it is available free of cost and anyone can change its source to reproduce a different version of the software. The Open Office pack contains every application that you should expect from it and that you had with MS Office. Open Office comes with a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation program, database management system, graphics editor as well as a formula editor. Open Office is widely used because it is free and as good as(even better than) MS Office. Open Office works with Windows as well as Linux.


Following applications are included with Open Office:
  1. Writer: Writer is a word processor similar to MS Word. Moreover, Writer can also export your documents in pdf format.
  2. Impress: Impress is a presentation creation program similar to MS PowerPoint. Here also, you can export to pdf format.
  3. Calc: Calc is a spreadsheet program similar to MS Excel.
  4. Base: Base is a database management system similar to MS Access. 
  5. Math: Math is a program which is used to create mathematical formulae. This application is similar to Microsoft Equation Editor. Documents can be exported to pdf.
  6. Draw: Draw is a vector graphics editor similar to Microsoft Visio. Moreover Draw has desktop publishing features similar to MS Publisher. Documents made can also be exported to pdf format. 

Conclusion:

Open Office is free to use. You don't need to buy anything. It has all the features that MS Office has. So if you are looking for a free alternative to MS Office, Open Office is the best you can get.