An Alternative to Microsoft Office
When most people think of a productivity suite, they think of Microsoft Office. This feature rich program has become the standard for almost all home and business users. There are, however, alternative office suites that may be better for specific users. One such office suite is Open Office.
Open Office provides all of the programs one would expect from an office suite: word processing (Writer), presentation (Impress), spreadsheet (Calc), database (Base). These programs also offer most of the features available in Office XP and can, in most cases, convert to and from the Microsoft Office file formats. Performance is also comparable between the two office suites.
The true advantage to Open Office is price. Open Office is available free of charge from the website OpenOffice.org. Another advantage is that the suite is available for many operating systems including Windows, Mac and Linux. While there is no argument Microsoft Office provides some additional features over Open Office, for most users, Open Office is more than adequate and a great way to save money.