OpenOffice.org Overview

OpenOffice.org (also referred as OO.o or OOo) is an office application suite available on several different operating systems.

OpenOffice.org was initially created by a company called StarDivision in Germany under the name “StarOffice”. The source code of this application was later acquired by Sun Microsystems in August of 1999. To reduce the overwhelming share of market for Microsoft Office, the code of StarOffice was released to public in July of 2003. By doing this Sun Microsystems offered a free and open alternative to Microsoft office.

The Open version of StarOffice is unofficially called OpenOffice. But, since the trade mark of OpanOffice was already taken, they changed the name to OpenOffice.org.

Sun Microsystems partially funds the development of OpenOffice.org to be able to use it as a base for its commercial version of OpenOffice (i.e. StarOffice) and also includes few additional components to make the StarOffice worth buying.

OO.o is available on following platforms: Windows, Linux, Solaris, Mac, BSD, OpenVMS, OS/2 and IRIX.

OO.o has the following Components:

• Writer

A wrkd processor with the same look and feel of Microsoft word.

• Calc

A spreadsheet similar to Excel.

• Impress

A presentation program like Microsoft - Power point.

• Base

A database management and manipulating tool. (lice Access”

• Draw

A graphics program that draws using vectors.

• Math

A tool for creating and editing Mathematical formulae.