By March 2005 the branch adopted the OpenDocument standard, and in early fall betas one and two were released. The first iterations of the database in December 2004 were simple flat files with little additional functionality beyond a spreadsheet. When the 2.0 branch forked, I began playing with the pre-release 1.9 versions. Since 19 January 2003 when I first started using OpenOffice I have moved into the newest builds. That's no typo: OpenOffice remains free for the downloading - Windows, OS X, and Linux. The increase in price from $0 to $0 is made quite tolerable by this addition. To this winning mix OpenOffice 2.0 adds a database. has always been cross-platform with a word processing module the equal of Microsoft Word called Writer, a spreadsheet that is nearly indistinguishable from Excel in capabilities, a presentation module that has all the capabilities of PowerPoint, and three other modules that Office has never offered: a WYSIWYG web page editor, a stand-alone math editor, and a drawing package with dozens of export options.

Openoffice drawing box