Open Office

Man, I hate to say this, but Microsoft really burns my wazoo.

I know, there are a million reasons to dislike the mega-corporation, but I’m just homing in on one. I spent 4 ½ hours today securing a client’s office network and setting up shared backup folders. I also uninstalled a bunch of unnecessary software. This included numerous “trial” versions of Office 2003.

I mean come one. SURELY mighty Microsoft could afford to give licensed XP users a copy of bare-bones Office. But no, they instead offer a trial version that will die unless the computer purchaser ponies up more bucks.

Well, that inspired today’s FamilyFirst pick: Open Office!

What is Open Office? They put it best: “OpenOffice.org is a multiplatform and multilingual office suite and an open-source project. Compatible with all other major office suites, the product is free to download, use, and distribute.”

In other words, it does virtually everything that Microsoft’s EXPENSIVE suite does, for FREE!

It even includes a relational database program, which MS Office users have to pay extra for, as in Office Pro!

So how does it compare to the aforenamed suite? Pretty darned favorably, if I say so myself. The individual programs have names NOTHING like the revered Microsoft products (so don’t think about repeating the Lindows lawsuit, Gates and co.), but you will soon figure out what program does what.

Impress produces slideshow presentations. Calc creates spreadsheets. Math is a sophisticated equation editor, with no real Office counterpart. Writer, well you guess what Writer does ;-). And finally Base is the relational database program.

If you want to download the suite yourself, feel free! It’s about 76 MB. And it WON’T nag you, it WON’T die after 90 days, and you can install it on as many machines as you wish!

Here’s to Open Office, and the entire open source movement!

http://www.openoffice.org

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