I have tried the OpenOffice.org office application suite for 7 months now and I find this application having the same features with Microsoft Office, give or take a few details. What I like about OpenOffice is its documents are lighter in size than that of MS Office. For example, I downloaded the Book of Psalms from Claretian Publications in MS Word format and it is all of 512 Kb in size but when I converted it to Ooo Writer its size shrinked to 123 Kb and I was able to save 389 Kb disk space for other uses. OpenOffice documents can also be easily converted into Microsoft and PDF file formats. One good thing about OpenOffice is it is free and you could download the 2.3 version from http://openoffice.org.

A site for everything free and open under the sun! A site for the advocacy of "free and open source software" use.

June 6, 2007

ATTY TOMAS V ALONSO

c/o Brotherhood of Christian Businessmen and Professionals

Cebu City Central District

Cebu City

Sir: 

Remember my previous email where you were not able to open an attached document having a “.odt” extension?  Well, in your computer's case, it is unsupported, and you have to install a software called OpenOffice which is quite compatible with Microsoft Office or Windows.  The beautiful thing about OpenOffice is – it is free!  Developed by Sun Microsystems as an office application suite, OpenOffice version 2.2 could be accessed and downloaded freely from http://openoffice.org and from there you could install all its mere 283 Mb size in your workstation PC or laptop drive C.  But the good thing about the documents made from OpenOffice is it is light on your “work disk space” and, thus, compensate for what space you surrendered to accommodate it in your system. 

For example:  A one page document done in MS Word would create around 24-31 Kb but with Ooo Writer you could only create about 11-13 Kb of space; for two pages it would be about 45 Kb as against around 18 Kb; and so on, with the space-saving trend favoring “*.odt” documents.  Ditto with the spreadsheets – MS Excel (.xls) as against Ooo Calc (.ods).  Explained graphically, I downloaded the Book of Psalms from Claretian Publications and it was all of 512 Kb in size but when I converted it to an OpenOffice document its size went down to 123 Kb and I have saved 389 Kb which I could use for other uses.

Another feature which OpenOffice is very useful with is it's very rapid flexibility to convert to Microsoft and Adobe documents.  Just click on the “SAVE AS” option on the FILE menu and you can change a “.odt” and a “.ods” into a “.doc” and a “.xls” or both into a “.pdf” file.  Vice versa, you could convert Microsoft into an OpenOffice document of you righ-click the document icon wherein a window of many options would appear and click the "Open with" option and choose OpenOffice.org. 

Why I am telling you this?  It's because

I am advocating for the spreading of free and open source software (FOSS) use. Downloading. installing, copying and re-distributing of open source softwares are encouraged without the hassles of copyright infringements that are quite common with commercial softwares.  Microsoft Windows might be a good operating system and very user friendly but prone to frequent system crashes and virus attack and quite expensive to install and maintain.  With the advent of FOSS I was able to look somewhere else and able to choose this freeware which was not possible to me, 4 or 5 years ago. Here in Kerygma Books & Hymns, I do all office documentations in an OpenOffice environment and, hopefully, for the next month or so, I would switch from Windows to either Ubuntu Linux or Solaris 10. Definitely, FOSS is a good alternative to third-world country users, like the Philippines and quite so.

May God bless you! 

-Jing

OpenOffice Writer (Word Processing)

OpenOffice Calc (Spreadsheet)

OpenOffice Impress (Presentation)

OpenOffice Draw (Paintbrush)