Open Office Software on Internet Written by Mike Magee - Essay Example

The software is comparable to Microsoft office with many official options it as spreadsheets like Microsoft Excel, presentation packages, drawing packages, etc. This project eliminates the helping wizards like in Microsoft office and introduces a new feature that may be somewhat helpful in the styles of the document. The best feature of this Open Office is that it maintains the database in form of a bibliography, which later helps in referencing or finding some extra resources for notes.

Being a writer Mike Magee emphasizes the feature comparable to Microsoft Word in Open Office in his article. After he reviews different word processors like the Byzantine Wordstar, Lotus Manuscript, Xywrite, Gem First Word Plus, and many more including different innumerable Microsoft word processors he prefers the Open Office Word Processor. He encloses that Open Office Word Processor by default gives many features for the document that may be changed and saved as a template document, later all other documents may customize concerning all favorite styles of document users saved. The software may read all the Microsoft extensions i.e., .rtf, .txt, etc, and may produce HTML files as well.

He as a writer likes Open Office as it allows him to switch all the auto options, like auto spell-check, auto-sense, auto sniff, auto quotes, etc, easily. Moreover, he switches off the option that changes his word Icons in OO icons.

Open Office is open-source software and is available free on the Internet. There are two kinds of software, one is open-source software and the other is proprietary software. The open source software is found free or for very low cost on the Internet or on Compact Disks with their source code for use. However, proprietary software is the same but their code is only with developers or sometimes with good hackers. Microsoft Explorer is the best example of preprimary software. This software is designed for some particular issues, as developers are not the users, and though it lacks the features and sometimes doesn’t allow enhancement.

Contrary to this, open-source software holds the source code and can be modified by the user according to its requirements. Briefing a little more about the proprietary software, that to eliminate bugs and have new functionalities user has to wait for the new version and developers work for this on extra money, despite open source oppose it and though use more cause its bug fixations are continuous and features release are regular to the user to use. Moreover, developers work for open source by volunteering themselves for free to specialize and earn a name where as all proprietary software is part of business trade-offs. And though it may conclude that due to the open source in hand, the user is more flexible with the open source rather than proprietary software.

Open Source Software is famous and efficient cause its source code is in the hand of users and can modify to their respective requirements. Source Code is a set of instructions or programs compiled together to run the software. Or in other words, source code is the set of statements that is readable to humans but not computers and to make computers understand that language it is compiled and changed into machine language. This set of statements seems to be nothing else than a document of text but values the whole software. A little change in the text of the doc may not allow the software to run perfectly and these source codes of different software are kept out of reach from users who don’t have any idea about computer languages. There are different languages in which software i.e., code of software can be written. Many of these languages depending upon the operating system they are supposed to be executed on.

Open Office is developed in a high language known as, Java UNO language supported by Sun Microsystems. For the execution, this language requires UNO Runtime Environment (URE). Microsoft Windows (98 - Vista), GNU/Linux ("Linux"), Sun Solaris, Mac OS X (under X11), and FreeBSD.are few operating systems that support this language and Open Office can be executed on them. Open Office binaries may be commercially used moreover Sun Microsystems, sharing development and their logo can never take back the code as according to the software agreement once the code is sold can never be taken back. Despite many facts and comparisons to Microsoft Office, Open Office does not support Microsoft Access files but these files may convert into other database scripts by using MDB Tools. Read More