Move
Over MS Office - You've Got A Twin
Brother And It's Free!
By Douglas Hanna
Microsoft
Office is an incredibly powerful
program with many great features.
It's also expensive to buy or even
upgrade. For example, one well-known
web site has Microsoft Office 2003
Standard for $369.40 and 2003 Professional
for $469.00. Even the Office Standard
2003 Upgrade Version lists for $226.80
However,
there's a great alternative available
called OpenOffice 2.0. It has nearly
all the same features and functionality
as MS Office but costs a lot less.
In fact, it's free.
OpenOffice.org
is both a fully-featured office
suite compatible with leading office
products, and a virtual community
working through OpenOffice.org's
numerous projects. The community
comes together at www.openoffice.org
to develop, support, and promote
the use of OpenOffice.org.
What do you
get for free?
OpenOffice.org
has historically consisted for a
word processor, a multimedia presentation
program, a draw program and a spreadsheet
program, In October, OpenOffice.org
released a long-awaited version
2.0 for Windows, Mac and Linux,
adding a new database module, support
for the OpenDocument file format,
a fresh user interface, and plenty
of other improvements.
But the license
is still the same. You can download
OpenOffice.org Version 2.0 completely
free of any license fees, use it
for any purpose– private, educational,
government and public administration,
commercial – and pass on copies
free of charge to family, friends,
students, employees, or anyone else.
How to get
OpenOffice.org
To get this
great, free program, just go to
http://www.openoffice.org/ and look
for the “download openoffice.org
2.0 link. It's blue on a bright,
green background.
You will
have to answer three simple questions.
Once you answer the third (“Select
Your Download Site”), you will
go to a page that gives you several
options for supporting OpenOffice.org.
Scroll down to the bottom of this
page and select “Continue to
Download.” The default will
be “Save to Disk,” which
is what you want to do.
Now, comes
the bad news for those of you who
have telephone dial-up access to
the Internet. OpenOffice.org is
75MB and takes over an hour to download
even at 15KB a second This means
you my want to go back to the original
screen where you can elect to get
the program on CD-ROM.
OpenOffice.org's
look and feel
I have used
only “Calc” (the spreadsheet
program) and “Writer”
(the word processing program). My
experience is that these programs
are virtually clones of MS Excell(tm)
and MS Word(tm). I wrote this article
using Writer and found the functions
and commands to be darn near identical.
For example, to check spelling,
I press F7 just like in Word. When
I select File, I see all the same
options as in Word, ditto Edit.
But here's one nice difference and
that is when I select “New”
from the File menu, I get the option
of opening a text document, a spreadsheet
or a database – without having
to leave the word processing program
to open a separate program.
I will admit
that some of the menu structures
are a bit different than Word or
Excell but are nothing that can't
be gotten used to in just a few
sessions. For example, OpenOffice
automatically saves Writer documents
with the OpenOffice extension .odt.
If you want to save the document
as a Word document, you must remember
to do a “Save As,” and
save the document in the appropriate
Word format.
So, when
it comes to OpenOffice.org, in the
immortal words of that old TV commercial,
“try it, you'll like it.”
And what I think you'll especially
like is the price.
Here's something
else that's new and free. It's called
HD Radio and it gives broadcast
radio the ability to sound as pure
and crystal-clear as if you were
listening to a CD-ROM. To learn
more about this amazing new technology,
just go my Web site, http://www.hd-radio-home.com,
to get all the buzz. Douglas Hanna
is a retired marketing executive
and the author of numerous articles
on HD radio and family finances.
(tm) MS Office,
MS Word and MS Excel are the registered
trademarks of Microsoft Corp.
