How do these open-source suites differ from Microsoft Office? Should your nonprofit consider one of them? To help you decide, we compared key features of the 2016 version of Microsoft's productivity suite to Apache OpenOffice 4.1 and LibreOffice 5.1.īoth open-source suites offer tools with the same names - Writer (word processing), Calc (spreadsheets), and Impress (slide presentations) - to compete with Microsoft's equivalent products - Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. However, open-source options such as Apache OpenOffice and the Document Foundation's LibreOffice have emerged - and many users feel they are as good or better than Office. Eventually, Oracle discontinued the OpenOffice project in 2011, but it transferred the trademarks and code to the Apache Software Foundation, which continues to manage and publish software updates.Īpache OpenOffice is currently in version 4.1.0, which can be downloaded for Windows, Linux, OS X and other operating systems.Microsoft Office continues to dominate the productivity software marketplace. Sun Microsystems bought a product called StarOffice in 1999, and Sun released an open-source version of the product in 2000 as a free competitor to Microsoft Office. As an international standard, other productivity tools can also be designed to read or write files in ODF. In addition, Apache OpenOffice supports other well-established file formats such those used with Microsoft Office Suite (.doc. This produces several new file extensions including. OpenOffice files are based on the international standard OASIS Open Document Format (ODF) for office documents first created in 2006 (ISO/IEC 26300).

These factors make OpenOffice a direct competitor to other major productivity tools such as the Microsoft Office suite, which includes tools like Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

Apache OpenOffice can be used by private, commercial, educational or governmental entity. Bigelow, Senior Technology EditorĪpache OpenOffice is an open-source office productivity suite used to create and edit documents (Writer), presentations (Impress), spreadsheets (Calc), graphics (Draw), mathematical formulas (Math) and databases (Base).Īs an open-source product, OpenOffice is free of purchase or licensing fees, and it can be installed on any suitable computer.

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