Microsoft Office for Free?

Well not exactly, but you can can have the equivalent features of Microsoft Office 2003 (the latest version) and more (e.g. Writing PDF files) on every computer in your computer suite for nothing.  A while ago I talked about open source software and in particular Open Office 2.0.  I have been using the Beta for the last month or so with great success.  Now the full stable version has now been released at www.openoffice.org.  You can download it directly from the download page.

OpenOffice.org the product is a multi-platform office productivity suite. It includes the key desktop applications, such as a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation manager, and drawing program and database with a user interface and feature set similar to other office suites (ie Microsoft Office). Sophisticated and flexible, OpenOffice.org also works transparently with a variety of file formats, including those of Microsoft Office.

My big concern was how all the Microsoft Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and Powerpoint presentations that I have might not load up on the new OpenOffice.  Well I can assure you that I had no problems with 100% of everyday files that I opened and only a few problems, which could be fixed fairly easily with the 20 / 30 files that I opened to deliberately try and fox it.  Taken from an Eweek review:

While extremely fancy documents—think legal paperwork—may not make it over from Microsoft to OpenDocument in perfect shape, the vast majority of your papers and spreadsheets will translate perfectly from one to the other. Let me put it this way: Over the last four months, I've flipped hundreds of documents and spreadsheets from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice.org and back again, and I haven't lost a font or a formula yet. The new OpenOffice.org also boasts an interface that's much more like the Microsoft Office interface. Unlike Microsoft Office, though, you can run it on Windows, Linux or Solaris and, regardless of platform, it looks and works the same.

There are more reviews available at PCMag.com and The Chicago Sun Times among other places.  A quick search on Google will also reveal many other reviews.  As Andy Ihnatko says

"There's no risk involved. Download OpenOffice 2.0, throw your MS Office files at it, and see what happens. OpenOffice 2.0 really ought to be the first choice for all students, nearly every user and even many small businesses. It's definitely not a replacement for Microsoft Office 2003, but it's an utterly credible alternative. And for most people, it's all the Office they'll ever need."

If you decide to have a go let me know your findings and reactions to this software.

Comments

[Matt]

I'm really impressed with OpenOffice. I've been using it for around a year and have today just installed the lastest version. One of the things I found it really useful for was being able to open Powerpoint presentations without having Microsoft Office and being able to save presentations I created using OpenOffice for use on different computers that use PowerPoint. As a free resource, I think this is excellent and well worth a download.