As with most of what we do at our home, we are always trying to figure out how to accomplish things at the lowest cost possible. We really have no need to buy an expensive business application suite like Microsoft Office 2007 or iWork. We do not work from home or have any business that would justify the cost of these bundles. However, we do have a need for a spreadsheet to do our budget and we like to have access to a word processor. We solved this problem by downloading a free bundle called Open Office. Open Office is free and considered “open source,” which means that various developers around the world are always improving it. We were hesitant to use Open Office because open source software generally has a reputation for being an ongoing experiment and purely out of ignorance, we were worried about viruses. Of course, in America we are addicted to name brand things that cost a lot of money as well. My husband read about Open Office on Wikipedia, spoke with IT professionals, and also discovered that entire governments are using Open Office. Open Office is a well designed program originally developed partly by Sun Microsystems and other developers. There are no known viruses for the suite and it is a very reliable program.  We have never had this program freeze or malfunction.

The various components of Open Office are:

Writer: Word Processor with PDF export capability

Calc: Spreadsheet similar to Excel or Lotus 1-2-3

Impress: Presentation software similar to Powerpoint

Base: Database Management with SQL capability, similar to Access

Draw: Vector graphics program similar to Visio or CorelDraw

Math: Program for creating equations similar to Microsoft Equation Editor

We downloaded the program on our PC and have had great experience with it over the past year. In fact, it is probably more than we’ll ever need. As I mentioned, we have no need to interface with other programs although Open Office is programmed to have its files go back and forth with older versions of MS Office. We use its word processor and spreadsheet programs on a daily basis (“Writer” and “Calc”). These programs have almost all of the features of Microsoft Office and have some unique features that Microsoft doesn’t have. Open Office is also compatible to load on most of the Mac operating systems (but since we are not Mac users, please read about it first). The best thing about Open Office is that it doesn’t cost anything. We really can’t justify the expense of MS Office 2007 and don’t want to break the law by downloading it illegally. Open Office solves most of our problems.

If you would like to read about Open Office or download it, click here: http://www.openoffice.org/

or click here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenOffice.org