Want a free Windows/Mac Compatible Office Suite? Check this info out!

If you want to get even the basic Office product from Microsoft, you can expect to pay $300.00. If you're savvy, you can find it for less but usually not less than $200.00. So I'm going to put $200.00 in your pocket, (a penny saved is a penny earned right?) by telling you about a product you can download, right now, absolutely free. Open Office 2.0 While this package orignally gained popularity in Linux, Linux is not required, this program will run on Windows and other operating systems.

History

Open office is distributed by Sun. (this site is powered by Java which also a product of Sun) This product was originally authored in Germany in the mid 80's. Then Sun came along and bought it . It was originally quite popular with the Linux/Unix community because it was free and compatible with Microsoft Office documents. The original name for it, prior to version 6.0, was Star Office. Starting with 6.0 the name was changed to OpenOffice.org ( the product name is the same as the website)

What it can do for you besides save you at least $200.00

Open Office is ideal for just about anyone. If we were to compare this version to a Microsoft version, we would have to compare it to Microsoft Office Professional Edition. Which typically runs in excess of $300.00.  OpenOffice has  five main applications:

Writer: Writer is a word processor like Word is. As a matter of fact, Writer can do almost everything Word can. It can open Word documents, edit them and even save documents in .doc (Word) format. In addition to that it has embedded illustrations, cross-references, tables of contents, indexes, bibliographies, Auto-complete, auto-format, and real-time spelling check Also there is a new standard that is coming out that few people know about as of now. OASIS is a new document format that in the future will become a standard for document compatibilty. People have gotten tired of not being able to open other versions of documents with their current office suite. For example you can't open a Word 2003 document with Word 97. This new standard will certainly come to pass and you can be sure you can open those documents for absolutely free!

Calc: A spreadsheet program not unlike Microsoft's Excel. In fact its so much like Excel, you probably won't have to learn too much at all to be able to use it. It's got a few differences but over all it works just like what you are used to using. Not mention that it has most, if not all, the tools that Excel has. This program will open and edit Excel files and save in .xls format.

Impress: Pretty much Power Point. Easy to use, has many of the same features as Power Point and will save in .ppt format. While there is no real need to save in .ppt format it does allow you to edit .ppt files just in case you need to. Otherwise you can save in OpenOffice's native document format and it will run just as well.

Draw: Can you say Flash? In addition to being able to create and import .swf files you can create 2D and 3D graphics, edit your pictures and put together complex graphic files.

Base: A database manipulation program. The office product Microsoft Access comes quickly to mind here. Except it has far more functionality.It natively supports Adabas D, ADO, Microsoft Access, MySQL formats. But thats not all folks, it also supports any LDAP compliant address book, as well as common formats such as Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Windows, and Mozilla. 

Now that you know about OpenOffice.org Version 2 You can save yourself thousands of dollars over the next few years. Aren't you glad you stopped in for this valuable information? Run on over to OpenOffice.org's website and read about it or better yet download it and try it. If you already have Microsoft Office you can play around with the compatibilty and see that everything you can do in Office, you can do in OpenOffice for 100% less. :)

Like this Review?  View All my guides.