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Who Needs MS Office?

May 2nd, 2007

The alternative to Microsoft’s expensive Office Suite.

Where would you be without PowerPoint presentations to the Board, Excel spreadsheets to balance the books, official documents and advertising flyers from Word, or access to Outlook to manage and correspond with your long list of contacts? Whether you work for a large million man company or run a one man operation, you probably use at least one version of the Microsoft Office Suite. These days it has become seemingly impossible to do business when you aren’t armed with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook. But what does this cost you? What’s the alternative?

Recently Microsoft launched the newest rendition of the Office Suite, Microsoft Office 2007. It comes in several versions, but the main two are Standard and Professional. Office 2007 Standard retails for $ 496.99 CDN and includes the staples of Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Word. The Office 2007 Professional package retails for $689.99 CDN and adds Access, Publisher, and Business Contact Manager to the Standard tools.

Open OfficeOpenOffice.org 2.0
What if there were a way to get all the functionality of Office Standard plus the added bonus of being able to create Access databases for the very low price of FREE? Well, thanks to the folks at Sun Microsystems and the hard work of hundreds of volunteer programmers around the world, the dream is now reality.

In 1999 Sun Microsystems acquired Star Division and their office suite, StarOffice, which has since undergone major revisions to include features previously found only in the more expensive office suites, such as Microsoft Office and once popular Lotus Suite. These days OpenOffice.org has become what is known as an “open source” software project. This means that hundreds of developers work on the suite in their spare time just because they know the can create something better than what’s out there and offer it for free. Obtaining technical support for OpenOffice is a breeze since so many programmers are passionate about it, and have personally contributed to its creation.

OpenOffice offers all the staples of a good office suite: Writer for full featured word processing, Impress for PowerPoint-like presentations, Draw for graphics and charts, Calc for those all-important spreadsheets, and Base for creating databases in Adabas D, ADO, Microsoft Access, and MySQL formats. The only component missing from this is an Outlook replacement, but if you’ve read past articles on Point Click you will know that Mozilla’s Thunderbird is a worthy replacement for Outlook. Thunderbird Version 2 is currently in the final stages of testing to move from “beta” status to a full version of the program. You can find that article here.

Does OpenOffice sound like it’s something worth checking out? If you are interested in learning more about OpenOffice, check out their website at www.openoffice.org

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Posted in Tips and Tricks on May 2nd, 2007

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