Matthew Leung Managing Editor

When Microsoft first introduced Internet Explorer (IE) as a free Web browser in 1996, it only got hold of 10 percent of computer users. As Windows became popular, and IE was bundled with it, that percentage went up to 40 percent in 1998 and 80 percent in 2000. IE’s monopoly status peaked in the summer of 2002 at 96 percent. Microsoft finally had control over the Internet.

Today, however, most people (at least at Vassar) would agree that IE is seldom used, especially on the Mac. In fact, IE only has about 85 percent of the browser market share today. This is due to IE’s rival, the now-familiar Firefox, which has about 10 percent of the market share. But Firefox isn’t another giant corporation going head-to-head with Microsoft—it’s a community-based project licensed under open-source.

Much like Firefox, the free open-source project OpenOffice.org (OOo) is chipping away at one of Microsoft’s monopolies: Office.

The site www.OpenOffice.org offers a quick link to download its office suite. A derivative of OOo, Neo-Office (www.NeoOffice.org) is another open-source project that adapts OOo to run natively on the Mac OS X to offer better compatibility. The OOo suite has seven applications to replace most of the functionality for Office: Writer as a replacement for Word, Calc for Excel, Impress for PowerPoint, Base for Access, Draw to create vector graphics, and Math to create formulas.

Since its development in October of 2000 and release to the public a year later, the functionality of OOo has become almost the equivalent of Office. With its new release of version 2.1 in December of 2006 and 76 million downloads so far, switching is almost effortless.

Upon opening Writer, I was immediately surprised by how similar to Word it appeared. Many toolbars and formatting options are almost identical between the two programs. Even some advanced options are found in the same menus. Writer and other applications are able to open all the Office documents without distorting formatting or layout. Even though OOo applications save files in their own format called the Open Document Format (ODF), they can also save files in all Office formats, such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. The Office formats created by OOo were able to be opened by the corresponding Office applications without distortions. Text and graphics could also be copied and pasted between OOo and Office applications without distortion.

In addition, OOo applications have some extra features. All of its applications can export documents to Adobe’s Portable Document Format (PDF). For PC users this is a boon, since Windows does not offer an in-house option to export documents to the PDF format. Impress (OOo’s version of PowerPoint) can also export presentations in the flash format.

Office, however, does seem to have a lead in its interface design and ease-of-use over OOo. OOo also lacks the task pane and smart tags, features introduced with Office XP to improve usability.

On the more technical side, Office also has better support for database integration than OOo does. But for an average user, who only uses five percent of Office’s features, OOo would be a free identical version that makes switching painless. Just as Firefox can take on IE and Wikipedia can take on Encarta, OOo can now take on Microsoft Office.