For those who haven't met it yet, OpenOffice (OOo) is a collection of programs that allows you to: edit text, spreadsheet, images, and database files. Its biggest advantage is its price (free!) so there's really nothing to loose. On a Windows machine OOo takes a while to load but on Linux I haven't seen this problem occuring.

With OpenOffice you can edit and save files in many different formats, including from MS Windows. Besides this, it has a excellent export to PDF function, so far its been the best I've found. For example, a 50MB presentation file ended up being converted to a 2MB PDF with excellent quality.

The biggest problem using OpenOffice is the lack of total integration with files from MS Office. Actually it will probably be an eternal problem since MS maintains its coding closed. So, you can end up loosing some formatting and formulas with the migration.

But, another added point for OpenOffice is the ability to have extensions on it, same concept first widely seen in Firefox. To install an extension on OOo just click on "Tools" and select "Extension Manager". You can find extensions to download at OpenOffice.org. I will now share with you some of my favorite extensions:

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