I have been using Microsoft Office for years in school which is now a standard in office software programs. Microsoft Office has its own set of bugs and problems. I saw the new Office 2007 which came with my new Notebook. It has changed so much that I have relearn how to use office again. I thought that there must be some thing better so I started looking for alternativ es and started looking for free or opensource alternativ es which don't require spending a fortune.
OpenOffice .org : It's an opensource office suite that comes with "Writer" for word processing , "Calc" for spreadshee ts, and "Impress" for presentati ons. It's available for computers running Microsoft Windows, Unix/Linux and MacOS operating systems.
I have tried using it almost 5 year back and I was not impressed but the new version 2.3 is much better and really impressive . One of the best things I like about the software suite is
it can open all Microsoft Office file formats&nb sp; and other popular file formats like wordperfec t.
Other things include an option to export the document as a PDF file without any Adobe Acrobat. The upcoming relase 3.0 is also expected to have PDF editing capabiliti es so that would be really cool.
StarOffice : It is a Sun Microsyste ms product available for about $70 but is now a part of Google Pack and is free. ; It is very similar to OpenOffice and also has a word processor, spreadshee t, presentati on, databases, math formulas and drawing applicatio ns. It has support for most Microsoft Office formats (except for the formats introduced in Office 2007), and like Open Office it can also export documents as PDFs.
IBM Lotus Symphony: In the year 2007 IBM also released its free version of Office suite called Lotus Symphony with a word processor, spreadshee t, presentati on applicatio ns.
Symphon y supports the OpenDocume nt format (ODF), Lotus SmartSuite formats as well as older versions of Microsoft Office(97- 2003) formats. It can also export PDF files like the other two office suits mentioned above. Symphony is available for Linux and Windows. Mac OS X version is not available but is expected sometime in mid 2008.
GNUmeric : It is an opensource spreadshee t program like excel which is a part of
GNOME desktop environmen t. but has a few more options and features than excel
Since you have seen the light and moved on to the free and open source world don’t expect to communicat e with the rest of the world using these new formats. Please don’t force others to try these options but do let them know about these options and let them make the choice. So until they decide to make the change be sure you save your work in Microsoft' s DOC, XLS or PPT formats.
