whistler’s blog

After reinstalling windows i wanted an office package on my computer, but as now I was tired of all the problems caused by MS Office on my machine I decided to use something other than that. I found a very good open source alternative, in which i am currently writing this text. The 75MB Package that I downloaded proved to be worthwhile. Not only is OpenOffice fully compatible with MS Office documents, its user interface is also very similar to MS Office, which makes the transition very easy. One of the best features I liked is the ability to save the document as PDF. But sadly this package did not include Bluefish, the web designing tool like Frontpage in MS Office. The suite has six software, Base which is a database system like Access, I wasn’t able to test this because it requires Java, which is not installed on my newly installed OS. Calc is a spreadsheet like Excel. Draw is somewhat like Publisher, Impress is the powerpoint like thing for OpenOffice. Theres is Math, something MS Office lacks, this can be used to insert mathematical notations in your work. Writer is equal to Word, I found only one problem with this the default install does show synonyms when a word is right-clicked and so Ctrl+F7 has to be pressed. The spellchecker of OpenOffice is not as good as the one for MS Office, but still it does the work. Overall I would prefer this over MS Office, unless I face some compatibility issues, with databases for example.