GNOME Office is an office suite containing:

*AbiWord word processor *Gnumeric spreadsheet *GNOME-DB, software that provides database connectivity.

The integration between the various applications in the suite is rather loose, and therefore many consider GNOME Office to be merely the collection of desktop productivity applications written for the GNOME environment rather than an office suite in the usual sense. Integration is achieved chiefly through the Bonobo (computing) component technology.

GNOME Office is intended to be a competitor to the Microsoft Office suite. The KOffice suite was developed earlier, but was not at first free software according to the strict interpretation of the Free Software Foundation, so the GNOME desktop was created as a free alternative.

Neither suite is at this time competitive with the Microsoft products in user base, although the feature set of both projects is getting closer to that goal.

There also exists an office suite called OpenOffice.org which is the free software base used to create StarOffice. Sun Microsystems is integrating OpenOffice.org with GNOME with the intention that the applications of OpenOffice.org will become part of GNOME Office.

=See also=

*List of office suites *Comparison of office suites *List of GNOME applications

=External links=