OpenOffice.org (www.openoffice.org) is an open-source project building the world's most widely distributed open-source multiplatform and multilingual productivity suite, OpenOffice.org. In 2000, Sun Microsystems founded the project, and it continues to contribute significantly as a community member.
The OpenOffice.org suite runs on Windows, Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, as well as on many other platforms, and in more than 100 languages, many of them professionally supported. Sun offers support for businesses and enterprises; consumer support will shortly be available. Besides support, Sun also offers services for users of OpenOffice.org.
The StarOffice Office Suite is the professional office productivity solution based on OpenOffice.org that provides enterprise value-add components including administration tools, commercial quality spellchecker and relational database.
The Sun Presentation Minimizer is used to reduce the file size of the current presentation. Images will be compressed, and data that is no longer needed will be removed.
For more information about the OpenOffice.org project including features, system requirements, documentation and other projects, please see OpenOffice.org.
The new chart engine introduced with OpenOffice.org 2.3 has been improved even further. In addition, OpenOffice.org can now export to PDF/A, which is a popular ISO standard for archiving read-only documents. Calc has improved DataPilot and Text to Column functionality, and Writer now has an easier way of changing the spell checking language. Finally, OpenOffice.org 2.4 introduces VBA support, allowing a number of existing VBA macros to be run unmodified. A full list of all the new features including a few screen shots can be found in the OpenOffice.org 2.4 Release Notes.
Microsoft Office users can now import and export to Open Document Format (ODF).
The Sun ODF Plugin for Microsoft Office gives users of Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint the ability to read, edit and save to the ISO-standard Open Document Format. The ODF Plugin is available as a free download.
The Plugin is easy to setup and use, the conversion happens transparently and the additional memory footprint is minimal. Microsoft Office users now can have seamless two-way conversion of Microsoft Office documents to and from Open Document. The ODF Plugin runs on Microsoft Windows and is available in 16 different languages.
Key Features & Benefits
Feature
Benefit
Open Source
The availability of the source code enables customization, ports to different platforms, deeper integration options and localization for any language.
Open Standard XML File Format
Access and process your documents outside of OpenOffice.org, and avoid proprietary file format lock-in. Beginning with version 2.0, OpenOffice.org will use the OASIS OpenDocument XML file format standard as the default file format. The OpenDocument file format has been approved by ISO as well and is supported by multiple vendors and applications. See opendocument.xml.org and www.odfalliance.org for more details!
Multi-platform
Users can have office productivity on their preferred platform(s), and across heterogenous environments.
Multilingual
Create documents in your native language.
Interoperability with other office suites
Leverage your existing investment - read, write and edit documents from other office suites, including Microsoft Office.
PDF Export
One click PDF export enables convenient document-sharing outside the enterprise.
Drawings and Diagrams
Create org charts, network diagrams and illustrations without requiring additional software.
