OpenOffice.org Writer

OpenOffice.org Writer

OpenOffice.org Writer 3 running on Ubuntu
Developer(s)	Oracle, community
Stable release	3.3 / January 25, 2011; 9 months ago (2011-01-25)
Development status	Active
Operating system	Cross-platform
Type	Word processor
License	GNU Lesser General Public Licence
Website	www.openoffice.org

OpenOffice.org Writer is the word processor component of the OpenOffice.org software package. Writer is a word processor similar to Microsoft Word and Corel's WordPerfect, with some of their features.

As with the entire OpenOffice.org suite, Writer can be used across a variety of platforms, including Microsoft Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, Irix and Solaris. Released under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public Licence, Writer is free software.

Features

Writer is capable of opening and saving documents in a number of formats, including the OASIS Open Document Format 1.1 (its default format), Microsoft Word's DOC, DOCX, RTF and XHTML^{[citation needed]}.

Writer provides a number of features not present in Word out of the box, including a word completion mechanism for predictive writing that is not available in Microsoft Word as of September, 2009.^{[citation needed]}. It has ability to export to the PDF format natively similar to that in [Microsoft Office 2010]] and Microsoft Word 2007 .

Features include^[1]:

• Templates and styles
• Page-layout methods, including frames, columns, and tables
• Embedding or linking of graphics, spreadsheets, and other objects
• Built-in drawing tools
• Master documents—to group a collection of documents into a single document
• Change tracking during revisions
• Database integration, including a bibliography database
• Export to PDF, including bookmarks
• MailMerge^[2]
• Equation editor (OpenOffice.org Math)^[3]
• Scriptable and Remote Controllable via the UNO API
• Indexing
• AutoCorrect
• AutoComplete

Limitations

• Grammar checking requires the installation of an extension.^[4] Document templates are also available as extensions for OpenOffice.org.^[5]

• Writer lacks a "normal" or "draft view" found in most other word processors, where paper margins and some aspects of the layout are hidden in order to let the user focus on text editing rather than layout. This is one of the most voted for feature requests on the OpenOffice web site.^[6]

• Cannot have a single document viewable in a split window view (either horizontally or vertically split), whereby you can view two different locations in the document at once (for comparison, editing, copy or cut and paste operations, etc.).

• Cannot open multiple documents in one task window (either horizontally or vertically split, or tiled with one another) and keep each document visible at the same time (for comparison, editing, copy or cut and paste operations, et al.) rather than having only a single document viewable at a time.

• Its outline numbering options (outline level designations or labeling, degree of indenting) are not nearly as flexible as other word processors such as Microsoft Word or Corel WordPerfect, nor customizable.

See also

Free software portal

• Comparison of office suites
• Comparison of word processors
• List of word processors

References

1. ^ Openoffice.org
2. ^ Openoffice.org
3. ^ Openoffice.org
4. ^ New Features in OpenOffice.org 3.1, an Early Look
5. ^ Openoffice.org
6. ^ "Issue 4914 - "normal" view option needed". OpenOffice.org. 2002-05-15. http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=4914. Retrieved 2009-05-23. 

External links

• Writer home page
• OpenOffice.org Processing Project
• Word Processor Writer FAQ
• OpenOffice.org Bibliographic Project