OpenOffice

Apache OpenOffice remains the most popular alternative to Microsoft Office. As Microsoft has steadily increased the pricing of it's productivity suite in recent years, OpenOffice has become more popular. It is still free to download and use on all major operating systems. There are four separate programs packaged with OpenOffice that correlate to Microsoft Office programs. The first of these is a word processor. It offers a feature-rich UI that lets users create a wide variety of documents. The documents can be saved in numerous formats including DOCX. The program will also open documents that have been composed in Word. A spreadsheet program allows users of OpenOffice to create calculations like those created by Excel. Database management is available through the Base tool, and presentations can be created with Impress. Those who have used other popular productivity suites in the past will find that the UI for OpenOffice is very familiar. Everything is very accessible, and the commands are very straightforward. Beginners can learn to use the tools with a minimum of practice. Becoming proficient at them and all of their features will take some time, but learning how to integrate all the tools with one another is very beneficial. OpenOffice will save new documents in Open Document (ODT) format by default, but the default can be changed in the program's settings menu. Files created with the suite can also be exported to PDF and other formats. There can be some glitches when working with documents that have been created using other platforms. For example, images that have been saved in a Word document might not display properly when opened with this software. Most of these issues can be resolved by making a few simple adjustments to the platform. At the present time there are also no options for cloud storage or email, and the developers have yet to introduce mobile apps for the various programs.