Tanner and Jessica @ theHellands.com

Every job I’ve ever had has required SOME use of a Microsoft Office product. Whether it’s graphs in Excel, or Powerpoint presentations for the management team, or writing up a timecard in Word - everyone is stuck using Microsoft Office at some point in their life.

And when you’re a student, sheesh - you may as well just tattoo MSOffice to your forehead. I spent half my time in college on SOME Office product.

Anyway, Office does a lot of things right. No doubt about that. But such functionality comes at a high price: the Standard version is $399 new, the Professional version is $499, and the cheapest version - the stripped-down Home & Student version - is $149. (All prices USD) I don’t know about you, but if I had a spare $149 lying around, I wouldn’t want to spend it on MSOffice.

Fortunately, there’s an alternative to all this!  The wonderful world of free, open-source software provides an excellent replacement for Microsoft Office.  The product?  OpenOffice.org.

(As you can probably imagine, the OpenOffice.org homepage is http://www.openoffice.org)

OpenOffice.org (or OOo) comes with 5 core programs:

Writer - Word Processor (like Microsoft Word)
Calc - Spreadsheet (like Microsoft Excel)
Impress - Presentations (like Microsoft PowerPoint)
Draw - Vector Graphics Editor/Basic Desktop Publishing program (like Microsoft Publisher or CorelDRAW)
Base - Database (like Microsoft Access)

Each of these programs is an easy switch for someone used to the MSOffice counterpart, and the best part?

THEY ARE COMPLETELY FREE.

Besides working similarly to the MSOffice products, OOo can also import and export your existing MSOffice files.  Writer can open and save Word documents, Calc can open and save Excel spreadsheets, Impress can open and save Powerpoints - so you don’t even have to lose your existing documents.

Honestly, OOo is one of the most impressive pieces of software I have ever used, paid or not.  Its uncanny similarity to MSOffice products - combined with faster load times, improved stability, and no price tag - made it a total no-brainer switch for me.  Even better, they just released version 3.0 this week, and the new features and improved performance make the switch to OOo easier than ever before.

For more information on why OOo is awesome, I’d highly recommend starting here:

http://why.openoffice.org/why_great.html

And if you find the lack of a price tag dubious, here’s an explanation of why OOo is free:

http://why.openoffice.org/why_free.html

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