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Can a free Microsoft Office rival do the business?

Posted 3 April 2007 at 9:20AM by Simon Dickson in IT systems and support

You'd be forgiven for thinking there was no alternative to Microsoft Office. Most under-30s will struggle to name a word processor other than Word; and as for Excel and PowerPoint..? But there is actually a very reasonable alternative, with an even more reasonable price tag: zero. Or to put it another way, roughly three hundred quid cheaper than the Microsoft suite.

OpenOffice.org (to give it its full and correct title) is available for PCs, Macs and various other platforms and offers a full-featured word processor, spreadsheet, presentation package, drawing program and database in a free 100MB (ish) download. The small German firm which originally developed the software was bought out by Sun Microsystems in 1999, mainly because it was cheaper for Sun to buy the company than to buy 42,000 licences to run Microsoft's equivalents. Sun then released the code to the open-source community, and continues to support its development. Version 2.2 has just been released, and whilst all users are advised to upgrade, there aren't many dramatic enhancements.

I've used OpenOffice for years, and I can testify that as applications in their own right, its programs are perfectly capable of satisfying your day-to-day needs. They can do more or less everything their Microsoft rivals can do... and sometimes a bit more, too. A particularly neat trick in its PowerPoint equivalent is the ability to export your presentation as a Flash file, for example; and the drawing application makes it very easy to do some very nice illustrations.

The OpenOffice user base is growing, slowly. There have been high-profile projects at Bristol and Birmingham city councils to switch to it from Microsoft; there have been similar moves in the US, and French MPs have just voted to do likewise this summer. Meanwhile, Microsoft has made some limited steps towards compatibility with OpenOffice's default file format (ODF).

But OpenOffice remains a small player in a market dominated by Microsoft, and will therefore live or die by its ability to handle Microsoft Office files. If someone sends you a Word file (although as we've discussed here before, be careful with statements like that!), you need a guarantee that your software will be able to open and work with it. And vice versa, you need to be able to create Word files which your contacts will be able to handle.

So... can you trust it? The honest answer is 'probably'. Compatibility with Microsoft's file formats was always good, and continues to improve. But personally, I always sidestep the issue by sending documents in PDF format, rather than trusting its export functions. And when I absolutely must produce documents in Word or Excel format, I always check them in the official Microsoft file viewers before I press 'send'.

There's no doubt that you can run a business using OpenOffice; and I'm sure we can all think of good uses for the hundreds of pounds you'll save as a result - as long as you're aware that it won't always be a smooth path. If you don't have the time or courage for all that, Bill Gates will happily take your money.

Tags: Microsoft Office, open source, OpenOffice.org

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