[http://www.openoffice.org/ OpenOffice.org] (also referred as OO.o or OOo) is an office application suite available on several different operating systems.

[http://www.openoffice.org/ OpenOffice.org] was initially created by a company called StarDivision in Germany under the name “StarOffice”"StarOffice". The source code of this application was later acquired by Sun Microsystems in August of 1999. To reduce the overwhelming market share of market for Microsoft Office, the code of [http://www.sun.com/software/staroffice/ StarOffice ] was released to the public in July of 2000. By doing this , [http://www.sun.com/ Sun Microsystems ] offered a free and open alternative to Microsoft officeOffice.

Since the trade mark of OpanOffice OpenOffice was already taken, they chose the name [http://www.openoffice.org/ OpenOffice.org] and that is why the Open open version of StarOffice is "unofficially" called OpenOffice.

Sun Microsystems partially funds the development of OpenOffice.org and uses 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.

Based on its mission statement, the goal of [http://www.openoffice.org/ OpenOffice.org] is "''To create, as a community, the leading international office suite that will run on all major platforms and provide access to all functionality and data through open-component based APIs and an XML-based file format.''"

[http://www.openoffice.org/ OpenOffice.org] is available on the following [http://download.openoffice.org/other.html#en-US platforms]: Windows, Linux, Solaris, Mac, BSD, OpenVMS, OS/2 and IRIX.

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

A spreadsheet application similar to Excel.

A presentation program like Microsoft - Power pointPowerPoint.

A database management and manipulating manipulation tool. (like Microsoft Access).

A graphics program that is a vector -based graphics and drawing tool.

A tool for creating and editing Mathematical mathematical formulae.

[http://www.openoffice.org/ OpenOffice.org] pioneered the ISO/IEC standard [http://http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument OpenDocument] file formats (ODF), which it uses natively, by default. It also supports reading (and in some cases writing) a large number of legacy proprietary file formats (e.g.: WordPerfect , StarOffice, Lotus software, MS Works, Rich Text Format), most notably including Microsoft Office formats. 

Core components of OO.o are written in C++. Overall, it is safe to say that most of the OpenOffice.org is written in C++ but many new features are added using Java, Python, StarBasic (OpenOffice Basic) or JavaScript.This is made possible by a component technology called [http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Uno/Article/Understanding_Uno Universal Network Objects] (UNO)]. It consists of a wide range of interfaces defined in a [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Object_Request_Broker_Architecture CORBA]-like interface description language.