OK guys...
I'm not going to go into the whole 'why Free software is better in the long run thing' (unless of course there's an interest for it 🙂 ) but for now, let me just tell you about OpenOffice.org (OOo).
OOo is an office suite (compare with MS Office). It runs fairly similarly to MS Office and can open most of your Office documents (Word, Excel, Powerpoint) perfectly (and in a lot of instances where you're opening files from an older version of Office, it works better than Office itself).
It can save to the normal MS Office format quite well, as well as saving straight to PDF. You can save your files as a MS Word document and whoever you send it to to open will not know that you didn't use Word 99 times out of 100.
On the other hand, its default file format for saving is an Open standard. MS are talking about possibly supporting it in future versions (not because they like it, but we can get into that later, too). Governments and libraries around the world (including Australia) have stated that they will be using this file format as soon as they can.
So I guess, long story short, it's a replacement for MS Office. Except it's free. The one thing is doesn't have is an Outlook replacement. Having said that, most people at home don't use Outlook (I'd guess Outlook Express) and those in a work environment that do can still keep the MS Office installed.
If you feel the need, head on over to the OOo website and download it. There's nothing to lose.
This is the perfect time for those of you at home that are using an illegally licensed copy of Office, or some other office suite to get up to date and most importantly, LEGAL. There's so many people out there that use Word just for printing letters and cards and there's no reason to not use OOo. Not that that's what it's limited to. I have been using it exclusively for over a year now and the only time that people I work with question it is when no version of Office they can find can open an apparently 'corrupt' file, and yet I can perfectly 🙂
So that's my thread... it looks as though the Firefox one is losing steam, so maybe this will get the closet geeks back out. Let me know what you all think!
I'm not going to go into the whole 'why Free software is better in the long run thing' (unless of course there's an interest for it 🙂 ) but for now, let me just tell you about OpenOffice.org (OOo).
OOo is an office suite (compare with MS Office). It runs fairly similarly to MS Office and can open most of your Office documents (Word, Excel, Powerpoint) perfectly (and in a lot of instances where you're opening files from an older version of Office, it works better than Office itself).
It can save to the normal MS Office format quite well, as well as saving straight to PDF. You can save your files as a MS Word document and whoever you send it to to open will not know that you didn't use Word 99 times out of 100.
On the other hand, its default file format for saving is an Open standard. MS are talking about possibly supporting it in future versions (not because they like it, but we can get into that later, too). Governments and libraries around the world (including Australia) have stated that they will be using this file format as soon as they can.
So I guess, long story short, it's a replacement for MS Office. Except it's free. The one thing is doesn't have is an Outlook replacement. Having said that, most people at home don't use Outlook (I'd guess Outlook Express) and those in a work environment that do can still keep the MS Office installed.
If you feel the need, head on over to the OOo website and download it. There's nothing to lose.
This is the perfect time for those of you at home that are using an illegally licensed copy of Office, or some other office suite to get up to date and most importantly, LEGAL. There's so many people out there that use Word just for printing letters and cards and there's no reason to not use OOo. Not that that's what it's limited to. I have been using it exclusively for over a year now and the only time that people I work with question it is when no version of Office they can find can open an apparently 'corrupt' file, and yet I can perfectly 🙂
So that's my thread... it looks as though the Firefox one is losing steam, so maybe this will get the closet geeks back out. Let me know what you all think!
