Everyone loves free stuff and when it comes to software everyone has its own definition of free. For most of us free actually means downloading pirated software from warez sites, but for the rest of the masses (those who doesn’t believe in piracy) Linux and OpenOffice.org are the names that comes to mind. In recent years, the popularity of OpenOffice.org has grown by leaps and bounds. With its version 3.0 set to be released in 2008, the Suite is second in popularity next only to Microsoft Office.
OpenOffice.org (OO.o or OOo) is an office suite application which is available for various operating systems. As its default format OpenOffice supports OpenDocument standard for data interchange. In addition to that it also supports Office '97-2003 formats. OpenOffice is based on Sun Microsystems’s office suite package StarOffice. The source code for the suite was released in the year 2000. OpenOffice is a collection of various applications like Base, Calc, Draw, Impress, Math, and Writer. Base is a database application that will help you create and manage databases—similar to Microsoft Access. Calc is a spreadsheet application similar to Microsoft Excel. Draw is a charting application that lets you make flowcharts, network diagrams and any other organization charts. Impress is similar to Microsoft PowerPoint—it is a presentation creation tool. Math is a formula manipulation tool that can be used inside other OOo applications,
or as a standalone tool as well. Finally, there’s Writer, a word processing application that is OOo’s answer to Microsoft Word. The suite also has a small program known as QuickStarter which runs when the computer boots for the first time. It loads the core files and libraries for OpenOffice.org during computer startup and allows the suite applications to start more quickly when selected later.
API of the suite is based on a component technology known as Universal Network Objects (UNO). It has a wide range of interfaces defined in a CORBA-like interface description language. The document file format used is based on several export and import filters and XML. All external formats are converted back and forth from an internal XML representation. By using compression when saving XML to disk, files are smaller in size than the equivalent binary Microsoft office documents.
