OpenOffice

    Professors at East Carolina University may expect their students to use and create documents which are compatible with Microsoft Office products.  Microsoft Office should be installed on all computers in general purpose computer labs across campus.  Students can obtain Microsoft Office at a discounted price at the University Bookstore.  If, however, you prefer to save some $ and use another office suite, you must be sure that it can import MS Office documents and produce documents that can be used by MS Office.  One such free product is Open Office.  I have downloaded and installed the word processor in OpenOffice just to see if it is compatible with MS Word.  My testing of the product indicates that it is.  I opened a MS Word document with OpenOffice, edited it, including pasting a screen shot into it, saved the resulting document as a Word file, and successfully read it with MS Word.  I found OpenOffice relatively easy to use, but being more accustomed to MS Office, I prefer the MS product.

    To install Open Office, go to http://www.openoffice.org/ and click on the link to the downloads page.  Select your language, operating system, and download site.  Save the download file in a temporary directory.  This file is a self-extracting archive file.  The version I downloaded was OpenOffice_1.1.3_Win32Intel_install.exe.  Double click on the downloaded file to extract the installation files.  Then open the folder into which the extracted files have been deposited and double-click on the setup.exe file.  Then just follow the instructions for installation.

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This page most recently revised on 12. November 2005.