OFFICE ARRIVAL

The OpenOffice codebase is the foundation for two products: StarOffice is a commercial product by Sun [1], and OpenOffice is the free software package available from [2]. There are no differences between the actual office packages; instead, Sun provides a collection of colorful add-ons, such as fonts, templates, and clipart with StarOffice. OpenOffice has most of the core functionality users expect from an office suite. The OpenOffice suite comes with almost all Linux distributions and is a major reason for the recent rise of desktop Linux. When OpenOffice 2.0 arrived after many months of preliminaries, we took a look to see if the final version was truly worth the wait. File Formats The most significant change in OpenOffice 2.0 may be the new file formats based on OASIS OpenDocument [3]. These formats are standardized and documented in minute detail, and what’s more, software vendors are allowed to implement them without restriction.