Open Your Mind and Close Your Wallet

Open Office Software vs. Microsoft Office

We’ve noticed these days, that many PC’s no longer ship with Microsoft Office included for free.  Instead, you might receive Microsoft’s scaled down version called Microsoft Works instead.

Hey, PC’s cost enough by themselves, even before you consider the additional costs of the software needed to use the computer effectively.

Ok, so what are my options?  Well the answer to this question is becoming more and more….Open Office software.

According to OpenOffice.org , here area few reasons why you may want to use Open Office:

• Open Office can be downloaded and used completely free of charge for any purpose.
• Open Office can also read and write files from other common office software packages.
• Open Office works on all common computers.
• Open Office stores all your data in an international open standard format.
• Open Office is the leading open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more.
• Open Office is available in many languages and works on all common computers.
• OpenOffice.org 3 is the result of over twenty years’ continuous high quality software engineering. Designed from the start as a single piece of software.
• Open Office is easy to choose, easy to install, easy to learn – OpenOffice.org 3 is the easy choice for an office software suite.

According to ZDNET Asia, the following companies are major contributors to the Open Office product include:

• IBM
• Google
• Novell
• Red Hat (associated with Linux)

The following chart outlines product offerings and prices associated with Microsoft Office (Home & Student) and Microsoft Office Standard as of October 25, 2009.

	Open Office $0	Home & Student $ 149	Standard $399.95
Word Processing	Writer	Word 2007	Word 2007
Spreadsheet	Calc	Excel 2007	Excel 2007
Presentations	Impress	Power Point 2007	Power Point 2007
Database	Base	N/A	N/A
Graphics Drawing	Draw	N/A	N/A
Note Taking	N/A	One note	N/A
Email /APPT/Todo	N/A	N/A	Outlook 2007

Click here to download Open Office 3 for free (no, really its FREE).