Open Office

As the twenty-first century keeps on rolling, technology continues to grow and our society continues to become more and more electronic friendly. Products such as Microsoft's office has almost become a necessity to almost every household. It is pretty much become the industry standard.

If someone wanted a copy of Office, they would be limited to a few options. First would be the obvious and pay Microsoft the $150-$900, that's from the student edition to the enterprise edition that has everything. Secondly, if the first one isn't an option, people could start to seek out a pirated version of the software from Kazaa, Imesh or any other file sharing software. Being how the RIAA has monitored such file sharing software lately, this could end you up in court.

There is a solution to all of this though.

I work in an office and have a few close outside friends that are programmers and network administrators. Over the past few weeks I have tried a few new ways of thinking. The first thing I did was realize that there are some serious unrepairable security holes in Internet Explorer. I'm a former Netscape user and just got frustrated with them about five years ago. I have found a customizable free browser that I would almost venture to say that every programmer I know uses and that is Mozilla's Firefox. The more I use it, the more I like it, but now back to my original post.

I have been an Office user for years, but I have recently found a free open source version of the software that is compatable with everything that I have used so far and that is Open Office. What open source means is that the source code for the software is available and can be manipulated to meet the users specific demands. Although the product as is is good enough for 99.99999% of its users.

On a side note, most hackers and people who write and distribute worms and bugs are doing so and directing them at closed source Microsoft Products. There are other operating systems such as Linux that they tend not to target because it is so open source and not a company making billions of dollars off of the public.

Open Office features include a Word Processor (Word) a Spreadsheet (excel) and a Presentation (Power Point) as well as an HTML editor. I checked out the spreadsheet, and I can write the same formulas in Open Office as I could have in Excel. Side note, I couldn't do the same operations in Coral (since the last time I used it) or Microsoft Works (the free version Microsoft gives you that basically wasn't compatable with anything else.) Open Office gives you an option as to what format you wasnt to save your document in. The only drawback that I haven't used it professionally and tried to save a compatble .dbf file so that it is dbaseIV compatable.

But, for the average everyday user, I give it two thumbs up.