Preface

It used to be that the saying "You get what you pay for" ranked up there with such indisputable truths as, "What goes up must come down," "Water is wet," and "I had to restart Windows today." But since OpenOffice.org is free, "you get what you pay for" is not only disputable, but down there with "the board of directors said the accounting practices were OK" and "hey, let's form an Internet startup."

OpenOffice.org, the open source product of Sun Microsystems' StarOffice, is a full-featured , remarkably good office suite. It matches Microsoft Office program for program, and goes a giant step further with a great graphics program, Draw. You get applications for working with documents, spreadsheets, slide presentations, web sites, graphics, and databasesanywhere from Oracle to a simple text file.

Want to do a holiday newsletter as a mail merge, printing out a copy for each of the 135 people on your address list? It's really easy. Put together a book? You've got all the tools you need. Do complex statistical or mathematical calculations in a spreadsheet? Ditto. Create a Web site start-to-finish (along with graphics, animations, and image maps). Open your old WordStar files from college and your Lotus 1-2-3 files from your first job. Scrape your jaw on the ground when you see how small the file sizes are.

This release of OpenOffice.org also has a bunch of enhancements over StarOffice 5.2. We're satisfied and impressed that the developers incorporated lots of good feedback.

What goes up must come down. Water is wet. OpenOffice.org is free.

(And yes, I really did have to restart Windows today.)