OpenOffice is Good at Flowcharts

Open Office is an open source office suite. It's like Microsoft Office, but free to download, cross platform. And it doesn't suck nearly as much. The other day I discovered Open Office's flowcharting abilities while laying out a site map. At my last job the tool of choice for that sort of task was Microsoft Visio. It has its flaws, though, the least of which being the hefty price tag attached to it. All I really wanted was a way to draw boxes and connect them together in such a way that when I moved the box on the page, the connectors attached to it would grow or expand or contract appropriately instead of breaking off. I'm sure there's a technical term for that, but damned if I know it.

I used Dia a few times for flowcharts, but the interface was awkward in some places and the Windows version wasn't quite on par with the Linux version. In comparison, OpenOffice's tools and interface are both richer and more polished.

The best indicator of quality, though, was that I just started using the thing without reading any instructions or introductory material. It was all straightforward and obvious. I wanted a box, so I clicked the thing in the toolbar that looked like a box. I wanted a connector, found the icon and clicked it, and got a whole palette of connector types (arrow at start, arrow at end, no arrows, etc).

One other important feature of Open Office deserves to be mentioned. In the course of my work I sometimes get stuck exporting database content into a spreadsheet. That involves writing a query to select the desired information; writing it to a text file in a tab delimited fashion; and opening that file in Excel or equivalent to do any formatting bullshit. OpenOffice (and I think Excel can do this too, albeit with an evil undercurrent) can connect to your database as well, and has the will, strength, and desire to execute your ad hoc queries directly into a spreadsheet. And because Open Office is what it is, you can save your spreadsheet or word processing documents in Microsoft-compatible file formats, so that true- and non-believers alike can all be accounted for.

And if that weren't enough, I believe OpenOffice's native file format is XML-based. That's another good thing.