A Micorosft Office Alternative

[tags]free, openoffice, alternative, microsoft, windows, office, microsoft office, word, powerpoint, excel, access, lockergnome, chris pirillo, internetnut[/tags]

Let’s face it. It’s true. Microsoft Office, of any version, it’s expensive. Be it Microsoft Office 2002, Microsoft Office 2003 or Microsoft Office 2007, if you legally purchased it, which I hope you did, it’s expensive.

Microsoft Office has some great tools, but are you aware that there is an open source (free) tool in which you can do everything that Microsoft Office can do, but without a cost of buying the software? OpenOffice.org, is a wonderful website where you can download an alternative to Microsoft Office. It does exactly the same thing.

With OpenOffice you can create presentations, use the word processer, create spreadsheets and databases. It looks so impressive and it’s features are so identical to that of Office, you wouldn’t believe that it is free.

The whole package comes with 8 different pieces of software, in which you can litteraly do what Office does. I’m not sure if you can import Office doccuments, but I will certainly try and find out.

The downsides I feel to OpenOffice is that sometimes it can load slowly, and that sometimes all of the features look squashed together. It doesn’t take any experince, so if you have used Office the chances are you will pick this up straight away.

In the word processer, you can make tables, style writing, make mail merges, work out formulae, insert movies or sounds, insert images, hyperlink, insert special characters and much much more. It’s the ideal Office, which isn’t really Office.

The presentation creator, named OpenOffice Impress, is a fantastic tool, in which you can create presentations for your businesses, family, school, work and do everything you can with Microsoft Office Powerpoint. You can also insert music, video, images and animations.

The OpenOffice “Excel” is a great little feature which can do all of the formulae that Office does, but without the cost. The spreadsheet is probably one of the easiest programs in the OpenOffice bundle, in my opinion.

If you do try out OpenOffice, please e-mail me at dcrone@inbox.com, letting me know what you think, and feel free to leave your comments to this blog post.

So head over to www.openoffice.org today and bag yourself, in my opinion, one of the best examples of open source software on the planet!