Vassar Misc Reviews OpenOffice
Vassar College’s Miscellany News has just published Microsoft Office gets a free replacement with open-source.
Matthew Leung introduces OpenOffice.org to the paper’s audience of Vassar College (my alma mater) students, faculty and staff.
He writes, “Upon opening Writer, I was immediately surprised by how similar to Word it appeared. Many toolbars and formatting options are almost identical between the two programs. Even some advanced options are found in the same menus. Writer and other applications are able to open all the Office documents without distorting formatting or layout. Even though OOo applications save files in their own format called the OpenDocument Format (ODF), they can also save files in all Office formats, such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint…
In addition, OOo applications have some extra features. All of its applications can export documents to Adobe’s Portable Document Format (PDF). For PC users this is a boon, since Windows does not offer an in-house option to export documents to the PDF format.”
It’s great to see OpenOffice getting more exposure on college campuses for an audience that truly stands to benefit from its free cost, broad compatibility, and ability to run on the OS that users choose, whether Mac, Linux or Windows.