OOo Components
People often ask about using different components of OOo as stand alones. The short answer is that this is not possible.
The long answer is that OOo is one program with many different features (like Microsoft Word) and unlike Microsoft Office which is several different applications that come bundled together. (This is why it is call an office suite.)
Because of the way that Open Office is constructed it would also not be advantageous to run OOo as separate components. There is a core part of OOo that is written (called the framework) that runs most of the application and is shared between all of the programs. If each part of OOo had to installed separate then the framework would have to installed multiple times. This is what has to happen with MS Office. As an example, we can look at the sizes of the rpms that are installed on Linux.
For the Linux version of OOo v2 the framework portion of the download is 82.3 MB and the rest of the download is 13.4 MB. So, it is clear that the framework is substantially larger than the rest of the program, so it is not really advantageous to install each part separate.
Thanks to Dan Lewis for these figures: http://www.openoffice.org/servlets/ReadMsg?list=users&msgId=1682317
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Last Edited 21 June 2006