A free alternative to Microsoft Office

Today a friend of mine asked if I had Microsoft Powerpoint. I do have Microsoft Powerpoint, but it is a commericial piece of software that is a part of the Microsoft Office suite. This means that it can not be legally distributed to others without paying additional licensing fees. My friend claims that he needs Microsoft PowerPoint to complete his school project. He is wrong. So what does he need? He needs a piece of software that can create PowerPoint compatible documents.

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Enter OpenOffiice. The OpenOffice program suite is a completely free package of programs that can be used in the place of the costly Microsoft Office suite. OpenOffice is developed and produced by volunteer programmers and is available for anyone to download and use at any time. Microsoft Office can cost between $200 – $300, so using OpenOffice can save you a substantial amount of money.

I always recommend OpenOffice when people ask me about Microsoft Office. Personally, I have used OpenOffice many times to complete school projects and assignments. All of these OpenOffice built assignments have been a great success. Just remember to save your OpenOffice projects in the appropriate file format to ensure that they will be compatible with Microsoft Office. If you have already used Microsoft Office, you should know the correct file format to save your OpenOffice documents to ensure compatibility. For example, Microsoft Word uses .DOC, PowerPoint uses .PPT and Excel uses .XLS.

Feel the power of open source! Download OpenOffice from here: http://download.openoffice.org/2.1.0/index.html
Website root: http://openoffice.org

About Wes Novack

Wesley Novack is a Technologist working in the software industry, with extensive experience building and managing highly available applications, services, and systems in the public cloud. He has a breadth of experience in online publishing, the consumer electronics industry, and building internet communities. Wes enjoys hanging with his family, skateboarding, hiking, the vegan lifestyle, and a good cup of tea. You can find him on Twitter @WesleyTech.

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2 Comments on “A free alternative to Microsoft Office”

  1. Yeah, but it doesn’t have that paper clip guy that asks you annoying questions about what you are typing up. You gotta have the paper clip guy.

    Open source software is a bit complicated for the foreign children who are going to be actually using this stuff on our factory floor. They are used to hitting the key board with a rock and they use actual mice for the mouses. I don’t know if they can handle it.

    They are going to have to make it more user friendly because today’s child labor is in a windows environment. They’re using windows 2000 because they were born in 2000. It all comes together in a package. How is Open Office going to compete with that?

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