OpenOffice.org - Write On...For Free

Just because Microsoft with its Microsoft Office is the biggest purveyor (some might say enablers) of communication software, doesn’t mean they are the only game in town.

Yep, the products from the merry band of coders in Redmond are not the only way, alternatives are available -- and for free. Some of them are downloadable, and some of them are web-based, but all of them can do much the same thing (and sometimes more) as Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

The leading free competitor to MS Office is from OpenOffice.org. It’s a free, downloadable software suite for both PC Windows and Mac OSX platforms with programs for word processing, spreadsheets, database manipulation and presentation. Oh, and the software in OpenOffice.org enables you open PDF files without a plug-in or commercial add-on, something MS Office can’t do.

Other free downloadable applications are available from AbiWord, Jarte (word processing only based on WordPad, which comes free with Windows), IBM Lotus Symphony and -- for Mac users -- NeoOffice, (which asks for donations to continue the work).

If you work collaboratively in a virtual office (and more and more of us do), Google Docs, a suite of web-based applications might be just the ticket. All the documents you create can live out in cyberspace, and you can invite others to collaborate on them, have them as read-only, or they can be saved locally on your own hard drive.