Running Linux, 5th Edition

Chapter 8. Office Suites and Personal Productivity

Linux has come a long way since the early days. When people started to use Linux not just for tinkering with the system, but rather in order to get actual work done, various kinds of servers such as email or web servers were the normally used applications. Typical desktop and personal productivity applications such as word processors, spreadsheets, or collaboration tools were mostly unknown on Linux.

This situation has changed fundamentally. A variety of office suites and other personal productivity applications are available, and this chapter describes some of the options. The focus is on OpenOffice, probably the most feature-complete office suite available for Linux today, but we also talk about other options, as well as collaboration tools.

Using OpenOffice

By now, OpenOffice has become the leading full-function free and open source office suite program for GNU/Linux and is included by default on most distributions, including SUSE, Red Hat, Debian, and others.

This should not take credit away from the other free and open source office suite development projects—KOffice and AbiWord come quickest to mind—but OpenOffice gains the stage here due to the relative maturity of its code base and the elegance of its native open XML file format (which even KOffice has) as well as the suite's ability to run on Windows and its compatibility with the popular proprietary file formats.

"OpenOffice" Versus "OpenOffice.org"

Certain conventions of language ...