When you buy a new PC, you always forget to include another £200-£300 for a version of Microsoft Office, which these days doubles the price of a new PC. Church people irritatingly call those projector things “PowerPoint”, brainwashed with the Microsoft way and willingly hand over bundles of cash for Office. But there is another way!
Open Office has been around a while, but it continues to mature and develop. It is open source, free and can handle all your Office documents in their native format. Most of the bundled applications work in very similar ways to Office. There is Writer (looks like Word), Impress (time to drop the Powerpoint), Calc (works like Excel), Base (almost as good as Access) and Draw (actually Office doesn’t have an equivalent for this one).
As pointed out by the JediMoose on the last post in this series, OpenOffice can also export PDF files.
Many organisations, businesses and government bodies are using OpenOffice as their standard desktop office suite. So stop calling your data projector PowerPoint, save some money, download OpenOffice and start Impressing people instead.
You can also download an information flyer for Open Office.