OpenOffice is a free productivity suite compatible with all major office suits. It began life as StarOffice from the German company StarDivision. Sun Microsystems purchased it in 19XXXX and made it open source, as well as selling it with additional services and product as StarOffice. A major selling point about OpenOffice is the commitment to open document formats and interchange. The developers have put much effort into the open XML format which ensures the long term accessibility to the documents stored in this format and facilitates easy transfer of the data to other systems.

To start up OpenOffice:

$ openoffice

You can start up one of the specific OpenOffice applications with:

  $ oowriter [filename]		Word
  $ ooimpress			PowerPoint
  $ oocalc			Excel
  $ oodraw			Draw
  $ oomath			Formula Editor
  $ ooweb			HTML Editor

Subsections

• OpenOffice Writer
• Dictionaries
• OpenOffice Impress