I run my company using OpenOffice.org instead of Microsoft Office. It does everything we need and costs a whopping $0.00; not a bad deal for a small business. To be more specific, OpenOffice.org
- Gives us word processor and spreadsheet programs that more than handle our documentation needs,
- Allows us to open Word and Excel documents which clients send to us,
- Allows us to save our documents in Word, Excel, and Adobe Reader (PDF) formats, and
- Runs on Windows and Linux, which is critical since three of us use Windows and one uses Linux.
About the only fly in the ointment is that OpenOffice.org version 2 cannot open Microsoft Office 2007 documents (e.g., .docx files). In practice, this has not been too much trouble since everyone who has sent such a document to us has been able to send us an older format .doc file upon request. Still, I would like to avoid bugging clients with such requests.
Relief is on the way, though. OpenOffice.org Ninja OpenOffice.org 3.0’s new features, an early look includes this snippet, along with several other cool features:
Microsoft Office 2007 (also called Office Open XML) file formats include .docx, .pptx, and .xlsx. Despite the similarity in names, these formats are significantly different than the Microsoft Office formats used since 1997. OpenOffice.org 3 will offer native read and write support.
There are lots of other useful, new features, too. See the article for “full disclosure.”
The scheduled release date is still about six months away but one of the nice things about open source software such as OpenOffice.org is that you can download the early versions if you want them.
Sure, Microsoft Office provides features that OpenOffice.org does not. But for the vast majority of home and office users, OpenOffice.org will do everything you need and save you hundreds of dollars in license fees. Download it and give it a try.
