As a follow-up to an earlier post about someone selling Open Office on eBay entitle “Amazing eBay Sale” I thought I would give some advice on where to get Open Office and how to install/use it, for those who don’t know already.
OpenOffice is free software anyone can download. It isn’t what you would refer to as shareware. It is open source software. There are many awesome open source software solutions out there. OpenOffice.org is the absolute best office suite available for free. There is a word processor (like Microsoft Word) called Writer, a spreadsheet app (like Microsoft Excel) called Calc, a presentation application (like Microsoft Powerpoint) called Impress, a database application (like Microsoft Access) called Base, and a vector image application called Draw.
Some will argue that these applications are not at good as their commercial counterparts. I tend to be of the mindset that OpenOffice has most everything that a normal office worker would need or want. So it does everything they would ever need it to do and it’s around $400 cheaper. The price makes it very attractive.
However, if one is a student, Microsoft practically gives away Office 2007 as long as you have a .edu email address. Really though, $60 is a high enough price for a regular user. It’s great software, but perhaps Microsoft got a bit greedy. Their greedy turned a lot of people to pirating. I prefer using OpenOffice to pirating any day. I won’t be breaking any laws if I download and use a copy of OpenOffice. I can get everything I need to do done with OpenOffice. It gives Microsoft the incentive to make their product better.