Power Downloader accelerates OpenOffice

As you might imagine, Power Downloader is a big fan of open-source software, and of OpenOffice in particular. The free productivity suite gives users all the tools of Microsoft Office for free, with only minor features lacking support. Notably, OOo, as it's affectionately known, supports the OpenDocument movement's attempt to standardize file formats.

Go-OO features a cleaner layout and better import filters than its parent code, the standard OpenOffice.org.

(Credit: Go-OO)

However, Power D knows that OpenOffice can be a slothful bear of a program. Running the Quickstarter can make firing up the app you need faster, but for busy software superheroes like Power D, that means having it load on start-up, which extends his computer's boot time. Speed, however, is only one of the reasons that Power Downloader is recommending Go-OO. It's a fork of the OpenOffice code, much the same way that Flock is derived from Firefox.

The interface has been enhanced and is much easier to use, with larger icons and less clutter. It still sports drop-down menus for fast customization, but there's no doubt that Go-OO comes with a cleaner layout. It also comes with an importer to handle DOCX, XLSX, and PPTX formats, and natively supports SVG files. Graphics rendering is greatly improved, too, including VBA support, Mono integration, better display of Chinese characters, support for WordPerfect graphics, and EMF rendering.

OpenOffice must be uninstalled before Go-OO is loaded, but that's a minor annoyance. Whereas Flock is a Firefox fork geared for a particular kind of user, Power Downloader happily recommends Go-OO to anybody who's looking for a faster, lighter, and slightly better version of OpenOffice.