Chapter 8. Office Suites and Personal Productivity

Linux has come a long way since the early days. When people started to use Linux not just for tinkering with the system, but rather in order to get actual work done, various kinds of servers such as email or web servers were the normally used applications. Typical desktop and personal productivity applications such as word processors, spreadsheets, or collaboration tools were mostly unknown on Linux.

This situation has changed fundamentally. A variety of office suites and other personal productivity applications are available, and this chapter describes some of the options. The focus is on OpenOffice, probably the most feature-complete office suite available for Linux today, but we also talk about other options, as well as collaboration tools.