On The Scene

It really is. I haven’t had to use Word in years, and I have never had a problem. Here are four reasons that you should have and use openoffice, if you don’t already.

1. Publish your Documents

When you deliver final documents, which is typically the end result of using a Word processor, it’s essentially publishing them, if only to those who need to read them. So why send a .doc file? If the person has no need to edit your document, why force them to open a Word processor just to read it. PDF has come a long way since the days of Acrobat 5, which took minutes to load and was slow as can be. Modern operating systems that aren’t windows (Mac and Linux) both come with built-in support for PDF viewing, and it’s rare to find a Windows computer without Acrobat installed. These viewing programs are, for the purposes of viewing documents at least, vastly preferable to Word, which still takes a long time to load.

2. Supports Everything

Sure, it’s no big deal to tout support OpenOffice’s support for .doc, and .docx. But does Word support .odt? I thought not, even though plenty of people do use OpenOffice and prefer to save in its format (that is to say, its superior format—more on that later). The open… menu supplies one with a massive list of supported formats, from Wordperfect to Lotus WordPro to MathML. I feel comfortable saying quite definitively that there are no formats supported fully by Word that are not fully supported by Openoffice.

3. ODT is an ISO standard

Go ahead, look it up, it’s ISO 26300. This means that it’s staying around. If you still think it’s not a widely-used format, consider this: Google Documents supports odt as well as doc. Microsoft is attempting to get its DOCX format, another XML format, endorsed by the ISO, but it doesn’t look good for them.

4. It’s free

This is obvious, but it’s true. Probably the primary benefit of OpenOffice to most is that you don’t have to pay for it—or, you don’t have to feel guilty about stealing it.