The Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) had no problem going against the grain when it decided to forgo the widely used Microsoft Office suite of business applications. Instead, it chose to replace its aging WordPerfect installations with OpenOffice.org - for free.

Like other OpenOffice.org applications, Calc has several dozen options in how it is formatted and operates. These options are available from Tools -> Options -> OpenOffice.org Calc. Thanks to OpenOffice.org's habit of sharing code between applications, some of the tabs for these options resemble those found in other OpenOffice.org applications.

OpenOffice.org is a multiplatform and multilingual office suite. It is a free office suite. A new version OpenOffice 2.3 is officially released today (September 17th, 2007) for Linux fans. OpenOffice 2.3 boasts of some improved features

IBM calls its new office productivity suite, built upon OpenOffice, Lotus Symphony. This disappoints two groups. The first group, fans like me of OpenOffice, wish it kept the OpenOffice name to help further the open cause. The second group wishes the old Lotus Symphony office suite, an early competitor to Microsoft Office, had climbed out of the grave.

Some people get sniffy about OpenOffice.org, calling it mickey mouse in comparison to the “serious” and “grown-up” Microsoft Office. That may have been a vaguely plausible jibe for version 1, but I've found version 2 to be incredibly fast and powerful – it really does everything I need in an office suite, and it does it well. And yet OpenOffice.org rarely gets the respect it deserves.

OpenOffice.org 2.4.0 is a free, open source alternative to Microsoft's Office application suite. It is fantastic if you need basic office applications — such as a word processor or spreadsheet — at no cost. However, large organisations and power users may be disappointed by its lack of features and support.

If Google really wanted to deliver a knockout punch to Microsoft, it would integrate OpenOffice with Google Docs, and sell support for the combined suite to small businesses, medium-sized business, and large corporations. Given the reach of Google, the quality of OpenOffice, and the lure of free, it's a sure winner.

The OpenOffice.org development team has released the second beta of the forthcoming OpenOffice.org 3.0 office suite. The latest beta includes a number of new features that will make the wait for 3.0 worth it. The final version of OpenOffice.org 3.0 is expected to be released in September.

We often talk about how useful the productivity suite OpenOffice.org is for anyone who needs word processing, presentation, and spreadsheet software, but doesn't want to plunk down a bunch of money to get it. While you may have heard of OpenOffice.org, there are some lesser-known forks and some handy tools that you might not know about. Let's take a look.