OpenOffice Portable

Earlier a colleague asked if I knew a way to open a document that had been created in an obscure program (his words) called Star Office. I did set off explaining to him what it actually was and how the document format he was referring to was created to an open standard but then realised we (he) live in a Microsoft world here and it wasn’t really worth the effort.

Anyway, I didn’t want to install Open Office on this machine just so I could convert one document. After recalling a conversation I had only two days ago I was heading over to PortableApps.com to download OpenOffice.org Portable, coincidence or what?

After downloading and installing to my 2GB USB drive, I fired up Writer. I was expecting the load time to be quite long but it fired up very quickly. I’m sure if it was plugged into USB 1.1 it would have almost not been worth it but I am mightily impressed by what I see.

Given that I can now take this with me wherever I want and open a whole manner of document formats, I’d highly recommend it to anyone.