by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
No, I am not about to engage in Microsoft or Windows baiting as appears to be a favorite pastime of technical journalists though I do have to say that I am not too keen on Microsoft's monopoly either and especially not on the prices that they charge for their software and we can take Microsoft Office there as a good example.
Baiting for the sake of baiting is, obviously, somewhat a waste of time but it can be worth looking at alternatives to Microsoft especially if you do not have an office suite pre-installed on your PC, and especially if you are on a budget as far as software goes or a not-for-profit outfit.
The prime candidate in alternative office suites is OpenOffice (www.openoffice.org).
This suite is worth more than just a glancing look especially if you do not want to pay lots of money to a vendor, as we said already. The best thing is that it is free. You download it, you install it and you are allowed to use a perfectly good word processor, spreadsheet, database, and other office applications without any risk of prosecution; install an unpaid-for copy of MS Office and the reverse will be true and you leave yourself open to legal actions by Microsoft.
While it may not, necessarily, look as elegant in its interface than its competition it will not set you back several hundred bucks either.
In addition to this there are versions of OpenOffice available for basically all platforms, e.g. MS Windows, Apple and Linux.
To top it all OpenOffice.org can read all MS Office files, bar, I believe, the very latest versions, e.g. of Office 2010 and all OpenOffice files can be – automatically – converted and saved as MS Office files; therefore full file compatibility and interoperability.
There are – slight – differences in the set up of, say, OpenOffice Writer to MS Word and OpenOffice Writer also handles graphics somewhat different to MS Word. This should be taken into account if one is familiar with MS Word and expects the same on OpenOffice Writer, for instance. This is especially true in the case of graphics that are placed behind text, including “watermarks”, as the text then becomes non-editable.
However, having said that, OpenOffice is a very good office suite and considering the cost – which cost? I know – it is definitely worth considering if you need an office suite but do not have the budget for it.
In addition to this OpenOffice Writer can export any document directly as a PDF file.
I would, however, suggest, when it comes to making PDF files to use a separate program, e.g. PDF Creator, free from Sourceforge. However, this is a Windows application only.
OpenOffice.org is available for MS Windows and for Linux and thus is a very versatile PC office suite that costs you zero.
So, why spend hundreds on MS Office when you can have the same, basically, with full interoperability (as long as it is not Office 2010 with the exception of Word) and you can also save everything as MS Office files, for nothing ion the form of OpenOffice and similar.
Open Source is the way to go, for both application software as well as Operating Systems themselves.
© 2011
