Open Office

Would you like to have an office suite of software, similar to Microsoft Office and compatible with it’s file formats, but without the price tag?

OK, so that’s a no-brainer; of course you would.

Well, Open Office is exactly that. It’s open source software that is 100% free to download and use.

Like it or not, Microsoft Office is the tool of choice for most businesses today, so if you want to do business with them, you need software installed on all your PCs that can read and write Microsoft Office compatible files. Open Office’s file formats are compatible with Microsoft Office so you can transfer files both ways easily. This makes Open Office a very smart choice for small business.

In my experience, there are sometimes small issues with file layout when transferring files, but I think that’s a small price to pay for such amazing, free software.

For me, the only real drawback of Open Office is that it doesn’t have anything to replace Microsoft Outlook, which I use for e-mail, calendar and address book. Apart from that it’s great.

Open Office includes:

• Writer – a fully featured word processor, similar to Microsoft Word
• Calc – an impressive spreadsheet program, similar to Microsoft Excel
• Impress – a presentation package, similar to Microsoft PowerPoint
• Draw – a drawing package for everything from a quick sketch to complex plans
• Base – a database creator similar to Microsoft Access

One of the really useful standard features of Open Office is that it gives you the option to save documents as PDF files. This is only available from Microsoft Office 2007 onwards and then, only as a manual download from Microsoft Download Center.

If you run a small business and have a number of PCs, the cost of Microsoft software can start to get prohibitive very quickly. Open office offers a really good alternative.

So if in the past you’ve struggled with inferior software, or even worse, you’re one of the people who uses pirated Microsoft software, do yourself a big favour right now and download Open Office instead. You’ll have fully featured and fully licensed software for as long as you want it – with free updates too.

Download Open Office

• Open Office

No related posts.