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OpenOffice.org is the most popular free alternative to Microsoft Office today. This rock-solid, open source productivity suite includes it’s own set of richly featured word processor, presentation suite, spreadsheet tool, database manager, drawing tool and a math tool; all of them being mostly compatible with the equivalent tools in Office (upto version 2003). Good as it is, OOo does miss a few bells and whistles which are holding it back from being a serious Office rival. Take speed for example – OOo (being Java-based) takes quite some time to start up, and also eats up a considerable chunk of memory while running. Yet another shortcoming is the lack of support for for the newly introduced “Open Office XML” format in Office 2007 (and Office for Mac 2008) versions.

Go-OO is an OOo derivative that aims to provide a faster, more functional and better interoperable suite than the parent program. The developers of this suite have brought about numerous small and a few big improvements to the OOo source code all over, to create Go-OO. Among major changes, Go-OO includes

• support for Open Office XML format in Office 2007 (and Office for Mac 2008),
• built-in SVG filter import,
• built-in 3D transitions within presentations (Linux only),
• powerful and interoperable fields implementation with nesting, in-place editing, multiple fonts & nested conditionals,
• faster startup than OOo,
• VBA macro support,
• improved Excel interoperability,
• support for multimedia content in Linux, using Gstreamer multimedia framework,
• better text-grid rendering of Chinese language,
• support for Microsoft Works format,
• improved EMF+ rendering, for a better view of embedded drawings,
• support for T602 files, and
• WordPerfect graphics (WPG) import support

 Details of these features and improvements can be found here.

Moreover, the Windows version of Go-OO has completely replaced the default icon set of OOo with clearer and larger ones (those of Gnome / Linux).

Go-OO is a free download, Windows (~ 130MB) and Linux only. If you’re a Mac user, try NeoOffice, which builds upon OOo and Go-OO’s source codes.

Go-OO
Available for : Windows (all), Linux
Rating : !!!!!
Links : Home | Download.com (Windows)

Go-OO not good enough for you? Try out some other offline and online free substitutes to Microsoft Office!