With the costs involved in obtaining a legal copy of the Microsoft Office suite I keep hearing the question “Is OpenOffice any good?“ Hopefully I can shed some light and provide some useful information.

OpenOffice Pros

• Free! Just visit OpenOffice.org and download it.
• Includes all the basic (and most advanced) functions MS Office users utilize.
• Looks and feels much like Microsoft Office 2003.
• Pre-installed with compatibility pack for reading and writing MS Office documents.
• Fairly large number of free and retail extensions for more advanced users.
• Export to documents to PDF, slide shows to Flash without additional software (and free).

OpenOffice Cons

• Harder to use the advanced features (the MS Office generally does a good job making menus quick and easy to use).
• Doesn’t look nearly as “pretty” as Office 2007.
• File sizes are larger than the new Office 2007 XML-based documents.
• OpenOffice – Microsoft Office file conversions are sometimes a bit picky (formatting can get skewed).
• OpenOffice lacks an email client like Microsoft’s Outlook.

In the end, I feel OpenOffice is a great substitute for home users that write a few documents and play with spreadsheets (but don’t write many functions). Many of these users are already utilizing their Hotmail/Gmail/Yahoo web-based email clients, so the loss of Outlook has no influence on their decision (and for those who need an email client there is Mozilla Thunderbird – a pretty good app when set up properly).

For a business environment Microsoft Office is still king. The latest version provides faster loads, drastically smaller file sizes (using the new XML format), broad compatibility, and, of course, familiarity (no need to train employees). For those IT professionals managing an Active Domain or Enterprise Server installation is a breeze.

Winner: Tie (I hate ties)

OpenOffice.org, Microsoft Office