16 Jan 06
OpenOffice Apple and Microsoft
A few months ago I decided to install OpenOffice on my PC. I didn't bother putting it in my blog because I didn't expect to be using it long. But I have not used Microsoft office since I installed it and I think its time to say way.
OpenOffice is an open source Office suite of programs including Writer, Base and Calc. I have spoken about Open Source before but for those of you who haven't been paying attention:
Open source software- software whose source code is published and made available to the public, enabling anyone to copy, modify and redistribute the source code without paying royalties or fees. Open source code evolves through community co-operation.
Anyway, back to OpenOffice. Writer is a replacement for MS World, Base replaces Access, and Calc for Excel. OpenOffice supports the MS native formats of .doc, .mdb, and whatever the excel format is, can't remember at the moment. More to the point though, the native OpenOffice format is based on XML. Now I'm not going to explain exactly what XML is or how it works, after Sarah got nervous when I started mentioning RSS. Anyway a document saved in XML format is about 10th of the size of a document saved from Word.
Having said that, the new version of MS Office, (released with Vista), will support XML format:
The change to file formats will largely be invisible to end users, said Mr Pryke-Smith. Though when people use the "Save As" option files in the XML format will have an "x" added to the usual suffix. For instance Word documents saved in XML format will be labeled "docx".
Files saved in XML will be smaller than Microsoft equivalents and should be easier to recover data from in the event of a crash. Mr Pryke-Smith said Microsoft was working hard to ensure that the new formats worked with the older style of saving files. Microsoft will update Office XP and 2000 so they can convert XML style files back to older formats.
BBC News
So why would you get OpenOffice if the new version of Microsoft Office will do the same? Well OpenOffice is free... Microsoft Office will be expensive, very expensive. Anyway, I've been using OpenOffice for quite a long time now, and I'm writing my dissertation on it with no problems.