Features Overview

• Faster than OpenOffice.org
• Good functionality in a nice user interface
• Can import Microsoft Works files and Word Perfect graphics.

Review

GoOo is a free open source office suite, providing all the functionality that Microsoft Office does, but for free! GoOo is based on the OpenOffice.org source code but it claims to be a lot faster. There are also a few other additional features in GoOo compared to OpenOffice.org. When Harmon recommended GoOo to me he said something like this: “It’s OpenOffice on steroids”

I’ve been using OpenOffice.org for more than a year now, since I threw away my Microsoft Office and decided to go on a “freeware mission“. I’m very satisfied with the way this freeware office suite worked for me, I had no trouble at all with it and grew to like it a lot pretty fast. The only problem that still persisted even in the newer versions was the very slow first-time startup. When I found out about GoOo I had to give it a try and see if it really is faster than OpenOffice.

With the timer in my hand I opened the same document in OpenOffice and in GoOo and the result was amazing. In fact, I didn’t need a timer to notice that, GoOo is two times faster than OpenOffice.org at the first-time startup and even faster if you compare the “second start”. They also made a few nice tweaks to the graphical user interface, it looks nicer overall.

The people that made GoOo also improved the way it handles Microsoft Works files, Word Perfect graphics and Excel macros.

The best thing is that GoOo is very open to improvements, anybody with coding knowledge can get in and get his ideas implemented quickly. You will have no trouble at all in switching from OpenOffice.org to GoOo because the functionality is almost identical except the few additional features that GoOo has.

Version Tested

3.1 – 10

Author

Go-oo.org

Operating System

Windows, Linux, Mac OS X

Download link

Summary

It’s open source and multi platform.

Faster and nicer than OpenOffice.org

Rating

Verdict

That’s what open source is all about: somebody makes a great program and then everybody can improve it and make an even better program. If you ask me now I wouldn’t find any reason to buy Microsoft Office. Both OpenOffice.org and GoOo are outstanding freeware programs and I believe they will get better and better in the future because they are open source. I wouldn’t be surprised if the next version of OpenOffice.org will be a lot faster than GoOo And that can only benefit you and me, the final users.

Subscribe to the RSS feed to get the latest articles fast and easy! You can also subscribe via email!

If you have any trouble with this software just leave a comment, I’ll help you out! If you know better free programs in the same category, please let me know!

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!