As office suites go, Microsoft office seems like it has it all and then some, and the reality is, that it does.. Microsoft office has a lot going for it, but Microsoft office also has a BIG hefty price tag to go along with those perks. Not everyone can afford Microsoft Office and in all honesty, not everyone wants to. To teens, personal computer users on a budget and small business people starting out, Microsoft Office is cost prohibitive.
Frankly, we don’t understand the problem when Sun Microsystems has Open Office available for you and the price is… well.. free.Thats right, Sun Microsystems Open Office is free.
Sun Microsystems Open office costs nothing to download or to use, and offers you the same features, for the most part, that MS Office provides and will even allow you to save your documents as docs that will be useful in MS Office, so that users who don’t have Open Office will be able to open your documents in MS Office. ( although we can’t imagine WHY they don’t have open office since the price is right.. did we mention, Open Office is Free?)
Sun’s Open Office is not a fly by night version of MS Office. Its the product of more than twenty years in the field of software, written by experts in that field. Open office is released underthe LGPL license program and that means that you can use it personally, commercially, educationally, in fact, pretty much any way you want. You can find extra templates on the site, much as you can for the other office software, but you don’t have to download a piece of software and run it to prove your open office is genuine and legal first.
You can, as I did, make copies and give it away. Thats the part that I loved.
I took over a company that is not yet a non-profit. I take in spare parts, full computers and other computer hardware and revamp it, refurbish it and give it away to older people and school children who don’t have one. They apply and we give it to them. CPU Center and CPU for all, was not non profit status and as such, when we touched base with Microsoft, even though we were doing a service and not at all accepting money or anything else for doing that service, MS wasn’t about to play.
Microsoft representatives kindly told us on the phone that Microsoft would be happy if we used their office suite for our recycling and donating of computers. Even though we were giving the computers away and had been for three years, we could use MS Office on our donated computers if we paid the license fee, unless it was already there when we were given the computer.
Open Office had no such issues. Open Office by Sun was thrilled to be packaged with a new computer for a needy child, EVEn if we weren’t a non profit. Sorry, but when all your time is unpaid and all the software you add in has to be paid for out of your pocket, then you tend to go where you get more bang for your buck and that, in this case, has to be Open Office by Sun Microsystems.
What does Open Office do? Pretty much you name it, Open office will accomplish it. The same features you see in MS Office you’re going to find in Sun Open Office. Secondary to that, Open Office runs on allthe major operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, Sun Solaris, Mac, etc etc etc.
Find another software that’s this completely un-proprietary and I might consider buying it. Then again…maybe not.
If you’re interested in what Open Office can do for you or your small business.. check it out at
Open Office Org
