Have you looked for a free office suite for your computer that allows you to do everything that MS Office® allows you to do? For many businesses, software that allows design of custom reports that gathers data out of a data base has been expensive. Have you looked for a free office suite for your computer that allows you to do everything that MS Office® allows you to do? For many businesses, software that allows design of custom reports that gathers data out of a data base has been expensive.
Ever since using File Maker Pro® and MS Access®, I have been in search of a program that will allow me to create custom reports for a fraction of the price. I found something better this past weekend. I found it in the free office suite called OpenOffice . Many of the costly programs limit you to use a proprietary database. This database in many cases will not scale well, and you could run into problems a few years down the road.
OpenOffice allows you to connect to a variety to enterprise size database such as, Oracle® and MYSQL®. This gives your business plenty of room to grow, and being open source, you will have the secure feeling knowing that it will not disappear someday.
Report creation is another important feature that OpenOffice offers. Many solutions out there use a complicated method, or even a method that allows almost no control over how your report looks. OpenOffice allows you to create a report just as you would type one on your favorite WYSYWIG word processing program. This is great news for those that want a professional looking report with all the charts, bells, and whistles.
OpenOffice even allows you to create your own Forms to enter data. This allows someone to create an entire custom management system for their company or small business. Best of all, OpenOffice can even read MS Word® documents. It also has its own spreadsheet and charting application that allows you to create charts and sheets that rival MS Excel®.
The newest OpenOffice allows you to export to PDF, Flash, XML, XHTML, and a number of PDA formats.
If you are looking for a solution that will give you a great deal of flexibility, and will not cost you a couple hundred dollars, OpenOffice might just be the solution for your company.