Open Office (aka OO) is an opensource application which means that the source code of the program is made available for public use and modification as users or other developers see fit. Open source software is usually developed as a public collaboration and made freely available. Two heads are better than one. More contributors mean more good ideas, anyone can report bugs, request new features, or enhance the software... It is distributed as free software and written using its own GUI toolkit. It supports the standard OpenDocument Format (ODF) for data interchange as its default file format, as well as Microsoft Office formats among others. However, ODF is common to most Operating Systems (Linux, Mac and Microsoft) where MS Office is only understood by Windows and lately by Apple Mac.

OpenOffice.org originated as StarOffice, an office suite developed by StarDivision and acquired by Sun Microsystems in August 1999. The source code of the suite was released in July 2000 with the aim of reducing the dominant market share of Microsoft Office by providing a free and open alternative.

Today it is widely used by people who have decided not to use illegal software (copyright infrigment is a crime in Ireland), schools, SME etc. OO is freely distributed as part of the Ubuntu operating system (See Fix-I.T. Newsletter Issue 23). There is also a version of OpenOffice available for Mac, however a specialy compiled version Neo-Office, is trying to breakthrough. 

NeoOffice is a full-featured set of office applications (including word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation programs) for Mac OS X. Neo (created in 2003) has created an office suite that is adapted to the unique needs of Mac users by taking the features in Oracle's OpenOffice.org office suite and adding improvements such as more stable Mac OS X code and significant speed improvements to the OpenOffice.org code. 

 OpenOffice.org 3 and Neo-Office are easy to learn, and if you're already using another office software package, you'll find your way around OpenOffice.org 3 straight away. The world-wide native-language community means that OpenOffice.org 3 is probably available and supported in your own native language. And if you already have files from another office package - OpenOffice.org 3 will probably be able to read them without much difficulty.

OpenOffice.org 3 and NeoOffice 3 can be downloaded and used entirely free of any licence fees. They are both released under the LGPL licence. This means you may use it for any purpose - domestic, commercial, educational, public administration. You may install it on as many computers as you like. You may make copies and give them away to family, friends, students, employees - anyone you like. After Ubuntu, it is yet another cost cutter in this recession climate....