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 four-and-a-half 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 on. SURELY mighty Microsoft could afford to give licensed XP users a copy of bare-bones Office. But no, it instead offers a trial version that will die unless the computer purchaser ponies up more bucks.

Well, that inspired today’s pick: OpenOffice!

What is Open Office? It puts 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!

[Continue reading OpenOffice]