Office Suites

• An office suite is a collection of productivity programs: usually a word processor, a spreadsheet editor, a presentation creator, and perhaps others. OpenOffice is a free, community-developed suite, designed like other suites both for personal and professional use.
  
  

Operating System Compatibility

• OpenOffice is available for Windows, Mac OS, various distributions of Linux, and Solaris operating systems. Development across these platforms usually proceeds at a synchronized pace.
  
  

File Format Compatibility

• Since the majority of the personal and professional world uses proprietary suites (most commonly Microsoft Office), OpenOffice wouldn't be much use if it weren't able to interface with other suites. In addition to its own Open Document Format, OpenOffice supports documents created by many versions of Microsoft Office, as well as other suites like WordPerfect, StarOffice, Lotus 1-2-3, and others. More universal file formats like plain text, RTF, and HTML are also supported. For a full and up-to-date list of compatible formats, see Resources.
  
  

Microsoft Compatibility

• With the aid of a third-party add-on, it's possible to open OpenOffice documents in Microsoft Office programs. You can get a download link for this add-on at Source Forge (see Resources). Choose the version corresponding to your language (the two-character code at the end of each link denotes the language).