Andrew Hudson - Fedora™ Unleashed, 2008 edition

► http://www.novell.com/— The home of Ximian Evolution, the standard email client for Fedora.

► http://www.mozilla.org/— The home page for Mozilla Firefox, Thunderbird, and the Mozilla Suite.

► http://www.spreadfirefox.com/— The Firefox advocacy home page is useful for converting those Internet Explorer types.

► http://ekiga.net/— Sign up here for a free SIP account for use with Ekiga.

With the rapid growth of open source software, businesses have directly benefited from developments in office productivity suites. Many businesses already use OpenOffice.org and its commercial counterpart, StarOffice, and they are already enjoying the cost benefits of not having to pay license fees or support costs. Of course, more suites are available than just OpenOffice.org, and in this chapter we explore the options available.

OpenOffice.org is not 100% compatible with Microsoft Office. Why is this? Well, Microsoft is notoriously secretive about its proprietary file formats, and the only way that OpenOffice.org could ensure compatibility would be to reverse-engineer each file format, an exercise akin to taking apart a telephone to see how it works. This reverse-engineering could be classed as illegal under U.S. law, which would make OpenOffice.org somewhat of a potential hot potato if they chose this path. However, OpenOffice.org manages to maintain a very high standard of importing and exporting, so you should not experience too many problems.

A productivity suite could be classed as containing two or more applications that could be used for creating documents, presentations, spreadsheets, and databases. Other applications could include email clients, calculators/ formula editors, and even illustration packages. Commonly they are all tied together by a default look and feel, which makes sticking to one particular suite much easier. Because Fedora uses OpenOffice.org as its standard office suite, we introduce you to Writer and Calc, the two most popular OpenOffice.org components. We also take a brief look at some of the other Linux-based office suites that are available.

For the majority of users of productivity suites, OpenOffice.org should fulfill most, if not all, of your requirements. However, the first hurdle you need to get over is not whether it can do what you require of it, but rather whether it can successfully import and export to proprietary Microsoft formats. In the main, OpenOffice.org should import and export with minimal hassle, perhaps getting a bit stuck with some of the more esoteric Office formatting. Given that most users do not go much beyond tabs, columns, and tables, this level of compatibility should suffice.

However, you are strongly advised to round up a selection of documents that could potentially fall foul of the import/export filter and test them thoroughly (of course, keeping a backup of the originals!). There is nothing worse than for a system administrator who has deployed a new productivity suite than to suddenly get users complaining that they cannot read their files. This would quickly destroy any benefits felt from the other useful functions within OpenOffice.org, and could even spell the return of proprietary formats and expensive office suites. Many users do not mind switching to OpenOffice.org, largely because the user interface closely resembles that of similar Microsoft applications. This helps to settle users into their environment and should dispel any fears they have over switching. Such similarity makes the transition to OpenOffice.org a lot easier.

Of course, just looking similar to Microsoft applications is not the only direct benefit. OpenOffice.org supports a huge array of file formats, and is capable of exporting to nearly 70 different types of documents. Such a wide variety of file formats means that you should be able to successfully use OpenOffice.org in nearly any environment.

OpenOffice.org contains a number of productivity applications for use in creating text documents, preparing spreadsheets, organizing presentations, managing projects, and more. The following components of the OpenOffice.org package are included with Fedora:

► Writer— This word processing program enables you to compose, format, and organize text documents. If you are accustomed to using Microsoft Word, the functionality of OpenOffice.org Writer will be familiar to you. You will learn how to get up and running with Writer later in this chapter. Writer is found under Applications, Office, Word Processor.

► Calc— This spreadsheet program enables you to manipulate numbers in a spread sheet format. Support for all but the most esoteric Microsoft Excel functions means that trading spreadsheets with Excel users should be successful. Calc offers some limited compatibility with Excel macros, but those macros generally have to be rewritten. We walk through setting up a basic spreadsheet with some formulas and show you how to build a basic Data Pilot later in this chapter. Calc is found under Applications, Office, Spreadsheet.

► Impress— This presentation program is similar to Microsoft PowerPoint and enables you to create slide show presentations that include graphs, diagrams, and other graphics. Impress also works well with PowerPoint files. Impress is found under Applications, Office, Presentation.

► Math— This math formula editor enables you to write mathematical formulas with a number of math fonts and symbols for inclusion in a word processing document. Such symbols are highly specialized and not easily included in the basic functionality of a word processor. This is of interest primarily to math and science writers, but Math can be useful to anyone who needs to include a complex formula in text. You download Math using Add/Remove Software.

► Base— This database was introduced with the OpenOffice.org 2.3 suite, which is provided with Fedora. It provides a fully functional database application. You down load Base using Add/Remove Software.

► Draw— This graphics application enables you to create images for inclusion in the documents produced with OpenOffice.org. It saves files only in OpenOffice.org format, but it can import most common image formats. You download Draw using Add/Remove Software.

► Dia— This technical drawing editor from the GNOME Office suite enables you to create measured drawings, such as those used by architects and engineers. Its functionality is similar to that of Microsoft Visio. You download Dia using Add/Remove Software.

► Planner— You can use this project management application for project planning, scheduling, and tracking; this application is similar to, but not compatible with, Microsoft Project. It is found in the Office menu as the Project Management item.

The OpenOffice.org office suite is based on a commercial suite called StarOffice. Originally developed by a German company, StarOffice was purchased by Sun Microsystems in the United States. One of the biggest complaints about the old StarOffice was that all the component applications were integrated under a StarOffice "desktop" that looked very much like a Microsoft Windows desktop, including a Start button and menus. This meant that to edit a simple document, unneeded applications had to be loaded, making the office suite slow to load, slow to run, and quite demanding on system resources.

After the purchase of StarOffice, Sun Microsystems released a large part of the StarOffice code under the GPL (GNU Public License) , and development began on what has become OpenOffice.org, which is freely available under the GPL. Sun continued development on StarOffice and released a commercial version as StarOffice 6.0. The significant differences between the free and commercial versions of the software are that StarOffice provides more fonts and even more import/export file filters than OpenOffice.org (these filters cannot be provided in the GPL version because of licensing restrictions) and StarOffice provides its own relational database, Software AG's Adabas D database. The StarOffice counterpart to OpenOffice.org 2.3 is StarOffice 8.