So we’ve already gone into a lot of detail about how good Open Office actually is. However, what you probably want to know is what unique features the suite actually includes. On this page, we’re going to tell you about many of the reasons people choose to switch to this suite from some of the alternatives every single day.

Start Center

The start center is a great feature introduced to put everything you need in one place. If you’re looking to create documents, spreadsheets or presentations then you’ll probably find this is to be very useful. You can simply select which you’d like to create and at the click of a button, you’ll find that everything has been setup for you and you can get started immediately. There are of course other options for you to choose such as databases and images which you will also find in the start center. This is a feature that was widely requested by users and was eventually added in Open Office 3, you probably will not be able to find it in other office suites available on the market today.

Creating & Editing Websites

The Writer tool allows you to not only work on documents, you can also create your own webpages too! This is done through a basic WYSIWYG editor which can allow you to customize everything to your own preferences. Once you’ve made a webpage, you’re then able to do whatever you want with it and can put it on the internet if you have a domain name and hosting.

Charts

When you’re writing reports and you’re dealing with figures, you’ll probably be looking for a better way to display your information in a way that everyone can understand very clearly. There is one simple answer to that problem – using charts. These are very simple, you can see with your own eyes the data you’re wanting to show. Luckily, this tool gives you a great way of doing this built-in with no learning curve involved. All of the features are ready to use as soon as you’ve installed the software, so if you’re looking for a wide range of chart tools and types, this package would be a good software to go with.

Full Microsoft Office Support

Now we all know that Microsoft Office is a very expensive alternative to what we provide that is quite commonly used too. You tend to find it in educational environments or workplaces, locations where you don’t have the option to use our software instead. This isn’t a problem though as included in the download is full MS Office support, you should have no problems creating a document in one and then working on it in the other. There isn’t any other work involved, just make sure you save it into the relevant Microsoft format when you’re doing so. You can make sure you do this by going to File –> Save as and changing the file extension.

Exporting Presentations as SWF

Not every computer that you’ll want to give a presentation on will have the software available to do it. In most cases, you would have to mess around trying to install the software just so you could use it once. However, Our Open Office download has a very good solution to this. You’re able to export your presentation as an SWF file, which can be used by a flash player. This is usually installed on most computers, especially those that are used often. Your presentations will suddenly become more compatible with more systems so even if they don’t own an office suite, you’ll still be able to deliver it as normal.

Hyperlinks

Sharing documents on the web is very common these days, the internet is a great way of spreading your knowledge to the masses and helping others around the world with whatever specialism you have. With so many references and helpful websites on the internet, it’s not surprising that you’d want to link to websites in your documents to help users even further. If you’re planning to share it online, you’ll be happy to see that this software has full support for hyperlinks and it’s really easy to do so too. Simply highlight the text you want to be clicked and select the hyperlink option. Once you enter the website URL, people should now be able to click it to access the relevant page you’ve included.

Export Spreadsheet as PDF

If you’re looking to produce a financial report, which could be an important part of your business, then usually you would have to spend a lot of time trying to manipulate the data to make it fit into a normal report. A unique feature of our package, though, allows you to export your spreadsheet in Calc as a PDF file. This makes it incredibly easy for you to distribute as if it was a report. It makes it simple and easy to transfer the statistics of sales as well as anything else you may need to show. This is quite a rare feature to find in an office suite.

Embed Formulae in Open Office

Math is an application which is part of the office suite. It allows you to make your own math formulae using expressions that aren’t usually available on a calculator or piece of software. Once you’ve created one though, what do you actually do it with it? Well a unique feature added to the suite means that you can easily embed it into any of the other tools in the suite. Even if you don’t want to do this, you can still export the formulae as a PDF file if you just want it on your own.

Automate Tasks

Some tasks can be very repetitive and boring, especially if you have to do them on a regular basis. This is something that is quite hard to solve in most cases, but with OpenOffice if it involves one of their tools then it’ll suddenly become a much easier job for you. The suite has a macro recorder which will allow the software to repeat tasks. Setting it all up isn’t too difficult, you just need to do the task correctly for the first time, choose your options and then it should be able to continue doing it for you whenever you require it from then on.

Thesaurus

If you’re a writer, you’ll know how important a thesaurus is. You’re able to look up different words so that you never have to repeat yourself many times over. In a shop you’d have to pay quite a lot to get hold of one and it could take ages to do it all manually. Luckily, We include one which is completely built in and is fully automatic. All you need to do is select the word you want to look up and it should give you a wide variety of different words that you could use in its place. This is something that you probably won’t be able to find anywhere else so we highly recommend that you install Openoffice if this is a feature you’re interested in.

Slide Transitions

Impress is a piece of software which is used to make presentations. When you’re making them, it’s always nice to have slide transitions between each slide to make it more interesting as well as to make it look professional. There are tons of different transitions you can choose from, all at a click of a button. Whether you want to have a different transition between each slide or keep consistent throughout, you shouldn’t have any problems. There seems to be much more available than any others you could choose from.

Mail Merge

If you’re a business which needs to send out letters quite often then this is a good feature to have. You can personalise letters so that every customer feels as if it has been written for them. You can insert customer data – such as names, addresses and order info – automatically, you won’t have to manually do it for every single customer. This download allows you to set all of this up within minutes. We have a guide available on our website if you want to try this out, it really does only take a few moments to import of your data into the software to do it.

QuickStarter

This is a small tool that automatically runs when you first turn your computer on. It doesn’t really do much apart from loading the main Open Office files. What effect does this actually have for you? It means that when you try to open up one of the tools, it takes much less time as most of it is already open. Most people will have noticed how quickly it loads up and this is the main reason for it. You’ll find that this isn’t present in most other office suites, but what we offer is a suite that includes many features to make things better for users.

Auto Correction

If your spelling and grammar aren’t fantastic, you shouldn’t let this get in the way of producing great documents. Our business tools have an auto correction feature – when you make a mistake, it will highlight it for you so that you’re able to change it. It even gives you suggestions of words you may have been trying to type if you really aren’t sure what the mistake is. There’s no setting up required to use this, it’s enabled as default and you’ll come to notice it if you start typing and make a mistake. This is just one of the many features we offer to you free of charge.

CustomShapes

This may only be a small feature which is included but it still could be helpful to users who want to add something a bit extra to their documents and presentations! CustomShapes is a feature which allows you to add very small images such as arrows and other shapes to your documents. They aren’t just ordinary images though because you can change both the size and the appearance of each one on the go without any complex alterations being required. It is just something you should consider when making one, you don’t want your report to be full of just text as it wouldn’t look very appealing. It’s always a good idea to add a lot of formatting.

Layout Views

We all know that when you’re writing a very long document in an office suite that it can be quite difficult to keep track of what you’ve written and what needs to come next. You may constantly have to change the page to find out which can be frustrating and very time-consuming. However, if you choose to use our Open Office download you may find that this isn’t actually true, you’re actually able to change the layout of Writer to match whatever you’re doing. If you’re wanting to display 1 page on the screen, that’s fine. You can even make it so that it shows the previous page at the same time so you can keep referring back to it. This is just one of the small ways we try to improve the experience for you.

Extensions

We’ve listed a lot of features that this download has built in here but there are so many more that you can get for free in the form of extensions. There is a free directory available which includes hundreds of different extensions, all of which will add functionality to the software that you wouldn’t normally find if not. We highly recommend that you browse this directory as you’ll find that most, if not all, of them will prove to be very helpful to you. It only takes a few minutes to get them installed and anyone can do it.

Open Office includes a huge range of different exclusive features which separate it from the rest, we’ve only been able to mention several of them here. Now you know about what the suite has to offer, why not get started and use our free download?