The free and open productivity suite

The best place to look for the latest, greatest releases and related information is at OpenOffice.org's Download Central web page, which can also be accessed via the Download tab at the top of most pages at the OpenOffice.org web site.

Most operating systems will run the latest stable release, but there are exceptions:

• The porting project and its members are the maintainers of the latest stable release for Mac OS X.
• The legacy release for Win95 is 1.0.3.1.

The next version will be 2.0 and it is scheduled for release in March 2005. In the meantime, developer snapshots (previews) are available for folks who are curious at heart. Note these snapshots are still in alpha state and are not necessarily stable. They are available for testing purposes. If you wish to test for bugs, this is the version that will be the most fun to use.

Use a download manager to start, suspend, and resume the download.

You can always order it on CD from various distributors. Note that these CDs cost about $10 as the individuals/companies providing this service have to cover their costs for this invaluable service.

You can use the Search utility if you cannot remember where you placed the file during the download process. If you just downloaded the Windows version of OOo, then the file should be called something like OOo_1.1.3_Win32Intel_install.exe or OOo_1.0.3.1_Win32Intel_install.zip.

To use the search utility in Win98, click on the Start button, choose Find > Files or Folders, type OOo into the Named field, then click the Find Now button. This will bring up a list of all files on your system that contain OOo, and it will show where they live.

To use the search utility in WinXP or Win2000, click on the Start button, choose Search > Files or Folders, type OOo into the Search for files or folders named field, then click the Search Now button.

The path to the search utility will not be exactly the same on every operating system, but it will be similar. (If you can provide exact steps to the search utility on your operating system, please do!)

Even though you have your file downloaded it is possible that it was not downloaded correctly. To verify that the file is correct please verify the MD5 checksum for the downloaded file. Instructions for using MD5 checksums can be found here. You will find MD5 checksums linked to the download page for each release, which can be accessed from the Download tab on most pages of the OpenOffice.org web site.

You need to “unzip” the downloaded file. You almost certainly have the tool to do this already on you computer: on Windows use WinZip, and on most other platforms use gzip. Then simply run the setup program in the “unzipped” directory.