Replace Microsoft Office with OpenOffice
This is an interesting article, one of several of it's ilk lately, and I often reflect on my own technologies choices and path. Years ago I was an unabashed, even evangelistic, Mac person. Then I moved to Canada and became part of a large pharmaceutical company that was decidedly anti-Mac. So, though my Mac was plugged in next to me, I turned it on less and less. Windows wasn't alien to me. I had supported many Windows users in my tech support days and was familiar with Exchange and Outlook. I even had a good amount of UNIX under my belt. Over the years (six now) I have before very comfortable with Windows. I do some of my own troubleshooting and am pretty productive. But I still held resentment towards Microsoft. So last year when I started consulting on my own I tried to go as much non-Microsoft as I could. I had StarOffice, Eudora, Now Planner, and Opera. Eudora was fine. Now Planner was okay. I generally liked StarOffice (v6), but I ran into trouble when I tried exchanging files with MS Office users. Word docs weren't formatted correctly, and boy did PowerPoint files get hosed. When I started consulting with my last employer I was resigned to shell out the dough and get Office. We had to send too many PowerPoint files to too many Office users. The risk for a trashed file getting sent to a prospective client was too great.
To be fair, I haven't tried StarOffice 7 (they didn't seem to offer much in the way of lower-cost upgrades) or OpenOffice 1.1, so I can't say for myself if the converters for MS Office are better. But right now I'm throughly immersed in MS Office and Outlook. Though I do use AvantBrowser, I'm not sure if it is really getting away from IE, since it runs using the IE engine.
Do I like the situation, no not really. I support Open Source initiatives and use several Open Source and GPL tools. So, my advice. Give OpenOffice a try, don't uninstall MS Office, of course. You might find that by the time the notice to shell out a few hundred for MS Office 2006 or whatever rolls around, OpenOffice is may be even better than MS Office. I can only hope.
Replace Microsoft Office with OpenOffice: “If you're thinking about buying the latest version of Microsoft Office, it's going to cost you $399 for each PC you own (or $239 if you qualify for an upgrade from an older version). If you need at least five copies, you might qualify for some kind of volume discount, but even then you'll probably still pay $200 plus per license. For a 25-person shop, that's somewhere in the $5,000 dollar range. Or, you can forget Microsoft altogether and install OpenOffice ? a free office productivity suite that runs on all major platforms ? and use your money for more pressing needs.
You can either download OpenOffice (a 64MB file), or buy the CDs from one of the dozens places listed on the site. For example, 123Linux.net, offers the CD for $4.95 and an OpenOffice tutorial book for $31.95. “