As the main concurent of Microsoft Office, OpenOffice.org 3 (or the OO3, as it is also known) is the leading open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers, with different operating systems. It stores all your data in an international open standard format, it can also read and write files from other common office software packages. As the most important thing, besides its performance, Open Office can be downloaded and used completely free of charge for any purpose.
The entire OpenOffice.org suite is released under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public Licence and it can be used across a variety of platforms including Linux, FreeBSD, Irix, Solaris and Microsoft Windows.
History
To better undstand the usage of the OO 3 you need some knowledge about its history, how the software was developed.
OpenOffice.org original name was StarOffice, an office suite developed by StarDivision in C++ and Java and acquired by Sun Microsystems in August 1999. Its source code was released in July 2000 with the aim of providing a free and open alternative to Microsoft Office. Oracle Corporation acquired Sun Microsystems in 2010 and stopped supporting commercial development, in June 2011 the company contribuited to suite to Apache Incubater to become a project of Apache Software Foundation. In December 2011 the foundation annouced that the project’s name would become Apache OpenOffice.
The components
The component from the Open Office suite are: writer, calc, impress, draw, base, math. Components that does not run separatly: basic, quickstarter, chart, gallery and media player, help.
