Free Office Productivity Suite
From LoveToKnow Business
The leading productivity suite is Microsoft Office(R). It's use is almost ubiquitous.
However, Microsoft's applications are expensive. There are alternatives, such as OpenOffice.org, AbiWord or KOffice. These application packages meet most small business requirement but are free (as in beer) and also open source (free as in speech).
The most comprehensive and most widely used package is OpenOffice.org. This suite includes:
- Writer, a word processor to create and edit text documents
- Calc, a spreadsheet application
- Impress, a presentation program
- Draw, an editor for graphs and drawings
- Math, a formula editor
- Base, a database and database application builder
All these components are integrated to one package.
OpenOffice.org is the successor to Star Office, a program developed by Star Division. Sun Microsystems bought Star Division and continued marketing the program as Star Office. It also licensed the source code under open source and built a community that offers OpenOffic.org. The differnces between Star Office and OpenOffice.org are quite small. Star Office adds some proprietary fonts and clip arts, an improved spell checker, improved reading and writing of MS Office documents and technical support. all this costs $69 - $89 depending on the version. The support can be renewed in 12 month increments.
The open source version does offer essentially the same functionality. There are numerous peer support options available:
In addition, one can find commercial support options, such as Plan-B for OpenOffice.org (currently in free beta test). Further there is more than a dozen books available about basic and advanced OpenOffice.org.
Many use OpenOffice as their private productivity suite in applications such as Scrapbooking Software.
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