Review of Apache Open Office

Open Office is equivalent to MS Word.

Initially, I got a warning message stating “Open Office can’t be opened because it is from an unidentified developer. Your security preferences allow installation of only apps from the App Store and identified developers.” So I had to go into the Security & Privacy settings on my Mac and click “open anyway”, because Apple doesn’t like software from 3rd party developers.

Open Office appears to work just like MS Word. I can’t really tell any difference with the different functions since they are all similar, but the interface is a little different. The MS Word interface appears cleaner and more streamlined.
 I notice that there is a small gray outline border representing the page margins in Open Office that is annoying and unnecessary.
 The formatting properties are on the right side in Open Office while formatting options are on the top in MS Word. 
I saved a file in Open Office as an .odt file (default), and it opened up in MS Word just fine. Accordingly, a Word document,  or .doc file also opens fine in Open Office, so file types are inter-changeable in each program. 
I was also able to successfully save the .odt document as a .pdf, which opened fine in Adobe Acrobat.
 The .odt document also printed fine, when I sent it to the printer.
 I already have MS Office installed on my Mac to include Excel and PowerPoint, which I also use. Open Office is only a word processor similar to MS Word, meaning that if I did not have MS Office and had Open Office instead, I would only have a word processor and not the entire Office package including other software.

This blog is part of an assignment from American Military University for my "Web 2.0 Fundamentals" class where I am to download three different open source software’s and review/compare them with commonly used  comparable software.