OpenOffice skakes Microsoft

IF THERE'S one thing in life that gives Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's abrasive chief executive, the shivers it's probably the existence of an outfit called OpenOffice.org.

OpenOffice is an open-source software outfit responsible for a bundle of productivity software that competes with the Seattle company's great cash cow, Microsoft Office.

It does almost everything MS Office does but, unlike the Microsoft product, it's free.

No cash upfront, no licensing fees, no advertising support: absolutely, totally buckshee.

A team of open-source devotees gives time to keeping OpenOffice up to date and Sun Microsystems, a business computing company with little love for Microsoft, helps to bankroll their efforts.

In October they launched the latest version of OpenOffice, version 3.0. A few weeks later they added, for the first time, a version for the Apple Mac.

OpenOffice now runs happily on Windows, Linux, Mac OS and Sun Solaris machines, and in just about every language.

Here at Doubleclick we've been using OpenOffice 3.0 for some weeks and we must say it's getting harder and harder to see why average users would want to shell out several hundred dollars for MS Office.

OpenOffice users get five applications: Writer, Calc (spreadsheets), Impress (presentations), Draw (graphics) and Base (database).

We have mainly been using Writer, and we reckon it compares very well with MS Word.

It works with a wide variety of formats, including the international Open Document Format (ODF) 1.2 standard.

It will open .docx documents created in Microsoft Office 2007, although it won't save in that format, but you can pick between many others, including .doc, .rtf, .xml, .txt and .html. You can also export files to Adobe's portable document format (PDF).

At the click of a button you can implant hyperlinks to take readers to a website.

There's automatic spelling correction and support for footers, headers, bookmarks, graphics, tables, indexes and tables of content.

Word probably still excels (no pun intended) if you're working in, say, a legal firm where lengthy documents are accessed by multiple users, all marking up contentious wording, adding comments and making changes, but for most us OpenOffice Writer does everything we're likely to need.

You can download OpenOffice from www.openoffice.org.

Mac users, please note: OpenOffice 3.0 requires one of the newer Macs with an Intel processor.

Owners of Macs with older PowerPC processors can opt for NeoOffice, based on an earlier version of OpenOffice, at www.neoffice.org.

OpenOffice is by no means the only office freebie around.

IBM offers its Lotus Symphony suite (ironically enough, originally written by Ray Ozzie, now Microsoft's chief software architect, but now based on OpenOffice code).

On the web you'll find Google Docs, Zoho, ThinkFree and several others.

Steve Ballmer recently told a US business users' conference OpenOffice is the only one that Microsoft regards as serious competition.

A "thermometer" on the OpenOffice.org website shows why.

In the first four weeks after release, OpenOffice 3.0 was downloaded more than 12 million times.

That's probably at least $2.5 billion lost to Microsoft, and mounting at $600 million a week.

So now you know why OpenOffice's existence gives Steve Ballmer the shivers.

He has Ray Ozzie and his team working flat-out on Office Web, a lightweight version of MS Office that will be delivered next year on the internet.

It will work inside browsers on computers running Windows, Mac OS X or Linux and even on an iPhone, Microsoft has promised.

Will it be free? That's a not a word often used at Microsoft's Redmond headquarters, but in this case it might just have to be so. We'll know time next year.

LAST week Doubleclick mentioned three ways of running Windows programs on an Apple Mac: Apple's own BootCamp, VMware's Fusion, and Parallels from a software company of the same name.

Several readers have alerted us to the fact that there's now a fourth: Virtual Box from Sun Microsystems.

Like Fusion and Parallels (but not BootCamp) it allows you to run Mac and Windows applications simultaneously and cut and paste between them.

Unlike Fusion and Parallels, it's free, since it's based on open-source software.

Sun acquired Virtual Box earlier this year when it bought a US mob called Innotek, not to be confused with an Australian company of the same name which produces bark-free dog collars, and has since improved it considerably.

The software can be down loaded from www.virtualbox.org, but note: as with all these programs, you do need an Intel-based Mac.