Portable OpenOffice.org

Pros

• Completely portable office suite
• Powerful apps included
• Easy-to-use wizard

Cons

• Missing some templates and clip art
• Apps run a little slower than usual

Portable OpenOffice is a lightweight app version of the complete office productivity suite that can be installed on a removable thumb drive. The main feature of this version of OpenOffice is that it does not need to be installed on a local hard drive in a computer. The image of the suite can be copied onto a properly formatted thumb drive that plugs into a universal serial bus (USB) port. Everything the application needs to run is store on the USB drive. The entire OpenOffice suite requires around 240 megabytes of space for installation. This makes it small enough to fit on most modern thumb drives.

Portable OpenOffice can start and run directly from the USB drive where it is installed. Inserting the thumb drive into a USB port causes a special wizard to activate known as the OpenOffice Start Center. The Start Center contains all the icons necessary to execute each of the productivity apps included in the distribution. Leaving the thumb drive in the USB port also allows a system tray icon to appear that provides fast access to the wizard later without having to leave the main window open. Since OpenOffice is written in Java, the portable version will work on nearly any type of system. This includes some modern tablets.

Portable OpenOffice includes six different apps in the lightweight installation. The first is a word processor called OpenOffice Writer. There is a spreadsheet program called Calc. The suite includes a presentation creator known as Impress. OpenOffice Draw is the name of a vector-based graphics program. Anyone who needs to work with databases can use OpenOffice Base. Finally, there is an app called Math that can be used to generate formulas through a graphical interface. Each of these programs provides much of the same functionality as the matching applications in suites like Microsoft Office.

Portable OpenOffice was tweaked to be more lightweight than the standard installation of the suite. The portable version is more tightly tied to the Start Center and opening wizard. The individual apps use a little less memory and do not try to access temporary disk space as much. Despite the lightweight changes, there is little difference in the core functionality of the included productivity apps. Write and Calc operate the same. They can still open or create a wide range of different documents and file types.

One of the only differences is that some of the peripheral libraries are not included to reduce the size of the portable suite. Fewer templates are in the portable version. Much of the clip art was excluded as well. Anyone using Portable OpenOffice can choose to save files to local hard drives or to the actual USB drive instead. Portable OpenOffice is a suite for anyone who needs to travel or move between systems with a powerful collection of productivity apps.

Pros

• Completely portable office suite
• Powerful apps included
• Easy-to-use wizard

Cons

• Missing some templates and clip art
• Apps run a little slower than usual