An office suite is a collection of related software for business and other uses. The software is distributed together in a single package, with a consistent graphical interface, and with strong interaction between the different components.
The types of software included in an office suite typically consist of word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, database and much more. For many users the office suite (together with a web browser and email client) represents the cornerstone of their computing day. A high quality office suite is therefore a necessity for any computing platform.
The market heavyweights in this software field are Microsoft Office (non-free proprietary software available for Microsoft Windows and Apple's Mac OS X) and OpenOffice.org, the latter of which is released under a freely distributable license and is available for Linux and many other operating systems. However, there are a number of other strong office suites that are available for Linux.
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