In this article about the best developers we will talk about OpenOffice, a free office suite that includes a word processor, slides, spreadsheets, vector drawing tools and a database. But the most notable thing about the platform is that all Apache OpenOffice services are free and multi-platform.
The history of Apache OpenOffice
Apache OpenOffice descends from the OpenOffice.org project which had as its initial base “StarOffice” (1994). This project had as its pioneer the company StarDivision (founded in Luneburgo, Germany by Marco Börries). In 1999 StarDivision was acquired by Sun Microsystems and in June 2000 the company launched the free version 5.2 of StarOffice.
A month later, Sun Microsystems decided to make the source code of the suite available to users (under the GNU Lesser General Public License), to start building a new open development community. The project was very well received by users and in 2000 it was named OpenOffice.org. From that moment, work began to improve interaction with Microsoft Office and GNOME. And until the base code was donated to Apache in 2011, the suite changed its license to LGPL in 2005 and changed its graphical interface in 2008 (Renaissance project). With the donation, Apache moved the code and web infrastructure to its servers and incorporated new encryption options and new spreadsheet functions, among other improvements.
The functions of Apache OpenOffice
One of the main advantages of the suite is the ability to import or export documents to different formats (original ISO OpenDocument). And with Microsoft Office the compatibility is total (read and write). One of the highlights of the platform is its dictionary (you can download dictionaries in different languages), using Hunspell as a tool (spell checker based on MySpell).
Applications of Apache OpenOffice
The applications included in the suite are: Writer (word processor of the office suite similar to Microsoft Word), Calc (spreadsheet similar to Microsoft Excel), Impress (presentation tool similar to Microsoft PowerPoint), Base (database utility similar to Microsoft Access), Draw (vector graphics editor) and Math (application designed for the creation and editing of mathematical formulas).
The license of Apache OpenOffice
Apache OpenOffice is a free and open source office suite (free access to the source code) and free distribution. It is available for Windows, Linux, Mac OS, BSD, OpenVMS, OS/2, IRIX, Solaris and OpenSolaris operating systems, in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions. This feature is one of the main advantages of Apache OpenOffice over similar tools and the commercial Microsoft Office.
