OpenOffice : a replacement for microsoft office.

Microsoft Office is really costly. If you work full time on office then you can afford to buy one. But what if you are a student and cannot afford to have buy a Office suite?

Here is the solution.
OpenOffice or OpenOffice.org(OOo) , the ".org" inclusion is due to a trademark dispute.

OpenOffice is intended to be compatible and directly compete with Microsoft Office. OOo is a free software under the LGPL and is available for Microsoft Windows, Unix Like systems and Mac OS X.
OOo is based on the code from an older version of sStarOffice that was made open source by sun microsystem with the aim of breaking the market dominance of microsoft. It gave the general public a version of StarOffice that was free including the source code.

The primary development platforms for OOo are Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux and Solaris, with ports available or in progress for OS/2 and many UNIX like Oerating Systems.

OOo suite includes 

• Writer (word processor)
• Calc (spreadsheet)
• Draw (graphics program)
• Impress (presentation program)
• Database User Tools
• Visual HTML editor
• Macro recorder
• StarOffice Basic
• Math (mathematical formula editor)
• Export and Import Microsoft Word and DocBook XML, export PDF and Macromedia Flash.

OOo can with some effort be configured to integrate with databases such as MySQL ans PostgreSQL, which offer similar functionality to Microsoft Access.

Why Apache Open Office? 

1. Great software : Programmers all over the world have contributed to the development for open office in one way or the other. 

2. Easy to use : IF you are already a offfice suite user, you will not waste a single tym to get used to the open office environment. 

3. Its free : Yup, its completely free. Use yourself, make copies, give it to your friends, use it personally, commercially or in any other way you can think off. 

How to Download: 

You can Download a copy of open office for yourself for free from www.openoffice.org.

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