Daily software alternatives

This section is undoubtedly going to take up the most room in the Computer section we’ve created. Of note though we’ll only concentrate this area on the types of software you’re likely to want to use every day like spreadsheets or a word processing document.

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A Microsoft Office alternative

So, with that in mind let’s start with a more than viable alternative to the hugely expensive, my opinion!, Microsoft Office suite.  The current version is Office2007 and for £99, direct from Microsoft, you can buy the Home / Student edition that gives you Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote.  However, the suite I’m going to wax lyrically about essentially provides you with access to the major components of the MS Office suite except their email software and instead of costing you £449.49 as MS Office would from Microsoft, how does free grab you from Oracle?!?

We of course point you in the direction of…

openoffice.org

Cribbed from their website, here’s their description of OpenOffice.  No need for me to re-invent the descriptive wheel when they’ve done it so well.  What I can tell you is this…as a photography business based in West Yorkshire, we’ve used OpenOffice for years and never has it let us down.  Like MS Office, there’s a ton of things it does that we have no need of but this is much more palatable knowing that it costs us nothing to use.  As a business we pay it forward by contributing information re bug reports, survey requests which is a small price to pay for this wonderful tool.

Here’s what OpenOffice wrote about their product…