Beginner Geeks: OpenOffice is a Free Cross Platform Alternative to MS Office

When you’re trying to save money in this bad economy, you probably don’t want to buy an expensive office suite. If you are a beginner geek, you may not know about the free OpenOffice alternative to MS Office.

OpenOffice is a free and powerful alternative to Microsoft Office and is available for Windows, Linux and Mac. The suite includes an alternative for the 4 main MS Office applications such as Word, Excel, Access, Publisher and PowerPoint. Here we will take a look at each of the applications available in OpenOffice 3.1 for Windows. This will give you an idea of ​​what to expect if you make the switch or are just getting started with it.

Open Office 3

The installation process is similar to MS Office and you can choose which features to install.

Writer

Writer is your alternative to MS Word and will take care of most of your document creation needs.

Calc

Calc is the Excel alternative and has similar features that will allow most users to work with spreadsheets, including those created in the MS application.

Impress

This is the alternative to PowerPoint and includes many of the same features. It provides you with templates for creating, giving, and publishing professional-looking presentations.

Draw

This is a vector graphics editor that is an alternative to MS Publisher. It includes many of the features included in other desktop publishing programs. You can add clip art from the Open Clip Art library to add unique images to your documents.

conclusion

OpenOffice may not have all the features MS users want, but it comes close. If you like the Ribbon feature of Office 2007, you won’t see it here. Another cool thing about OpenOffice is that it is available in a portable version so you can take it with you on a flash drive, and it is included in various Linux distributions. OpenOffice can open docx files but cannot save them in that format, but now MS can open and save documents in Open Document format. That’s why you shouldn’t have a problem exchanging documents between the two of you. If you are looking for the document creation capabilities of MS Office, but don’t want to spend the money, OpenOffice is a good choice.

Download Open Office for Windows, Linux or Mac

Also take a look at IBM Lotus Symphony, which is based on Open Office.

IBM Lotus Symphony