Help Desk Geek – Help Desk Tips For IT Pros

While Microsoft Office has always gotten fairly good reviews by Windows users, it is one of those programs that has not received the greatest of reviews, for the Mac Edition. iWork, Apple’s own office suite, has slightly better ratings by Mac consumers, but not by much. Finally, Open Office is a completely free solution, that supposedly is able to rival Office and iWork in functionality. Today’s post provides an unbiased review of Open Office for Mac.

Open Office for Mac is an office suite composed of six different applications: Text Document (Word, Pages), Spreadsheet (Excel, Numbers), Presentation (Power Point, Keynote), Drawing, Database, and Reviews. This information alone will be enough for some Mac users to discard Open Office as a viable Office Suite, as it does not have an answer for one of Microsoft Office’s most popular and widely used programs, Outlook. So if you need Microsoft Outlook, Office for Mac is probably the best office suite solution for you, as you cannot just purchase Outlook for Mac, you must purchase the entire Office pack.

MS Office for Mac Home and Student Edition gives you a Word Processor, a Presentation Software, and a Spreadsheet Software, as does iWork and Open Office, but Open Office software is deployed a bit differently. When you install Microsoft Office on Mac, you get three individual apps, and when you install iWork for Mac, you get three individual apps. Individual apps, meaning that each program is specific and is deployed individually. With Open Office for Mac, you get just one application, OpenOffice.org, which contains all six features. So, you will only have one app open with Open Office, even if you are working on  a document, spreadsheet, and presentation.

As far as user interface with Open Office, it is very, very similar to Microsoft Office. The main difference is, MS Office uses more navigation bars and tabs, where Open Office uses more icons and buttons. This is the trend for all six programs.

Without going into extreme detail about each and every feature that Open Office offers, let’s just analyze if for what it is, a free software. Lifelong Microsoft Office users may have a bit of a learning curve if switching from MS Office to Open Office. Lifelong iWork users may have even more of a learning curve if switching from iWork to Open Office, but the good thing is, Open Office is a learnable office suite that is for the most part user friendly. It does not have the computing power and mathematical equation power of MS Office, nor does it have the simplicity of iWork. However, it should not be disregarded as an alternative Office Suite for those who cannot afford MS Office or iWork, as it does offer all of the features that make up a good office software.

Before you purchase Microsoft Office for Mac or iWork, download OpenOffice and demo it. It is one of the best freeware programs for OS X.

Here are some screenshots of Open Office for Mac: