u l t r a m o o k i e

For all of you who don’t know: Microsoft Office XP Professional costs $600. If you don’t want MS Access, you can get Microsoft Office XP Standard for a mere $450. I use Office XP at work and it works fine for the stuff I do there, but when I went on a search to find an alternative to paying $600 (or even $450) for an office package, I turned up a real gem that does all of the stuff that Microsoft Office XP does, but for free. What package am I talking about?

To start off though, I want to comment on something. Linux is great and I like the idea that there is a free OS out there, especially an industrial strength free OS for servers. And that is just what Linux is good for: Servers. When mom and pop, or even grams fires up their computers though, they will expect Microsoft Windows (or some flavor or sort to come up) — of course that is unless they are smart and got a Mac, but that’s a whole different story!

The reason being is that mom and pop would like to use the mainstream stuff out there that’s not available for Linux like Quicken, etc. But when it comes to word processing, I think that an alternative to Microsoft Office would be OK if it could read/write MS Office formatted files.

That is where [url=http://www.openoffice.org/" target="__OOo]OpenOffice.org[/url] steps in. This is the free brother of Sun Microsystem’s [url=http://wwws.sun.com/software/star/staroffice/6.0/" target="__SO]StarOffice[/url]. The only missing feature is the database and technical support. So what’s it got and what makes it so great?

Easy, it’s got all the major features of Microsoft Office XP Standard: A word processor (Writer), a spreadsheet app (Calc), HTML editor (HTML Editor), and presentation application (Impress). And it has a vector drawing application (Draw) thrown in for good measure.

While the applications have the major functions of Microsoft Office, there are no real frills with the package – though there are some functions in Office that just aren’t needed, additions to MS Office to make another 12 month development cycle look like it was needed. Truthfully, ask yourself, at home how many times you’ve used the very advanced features of MS Word or MS Excel. You’ll probably answer, “Not that often” or even, “Never.” In the quest to earn your hard-earned money, Microsoft has been steadily adding advanced features into its Office products that no regular home user would use. Featuretitis is strong in MS Office and why should we pay for it?

I wish that the Writer application had a Normal view like Microsoft Word does (instead of always being in the page-layout mode). I wish that the Calc application had super highlighting of cells when I see formulas. There are a lot of things that I wish for in OpenOffice.org, but I have to keep in mind two things: 1) This is a 1.0.1 release and 2) This is free. What it has is well worth the price (free), what it’s worth is priceless. I thank everyone who has put work into this suite because it is truly wonderful. I’ll promote it on UltraMookie.com as much as I can.

What are you waiting for? If you’re using an illegal copy of Microsoft Office XP, then uninstall it and go download a free copy of OpenOffice.org. If you’re just looking for a good alternative to Microsoft Office XP, here’s what you’ve been looking for. For everyone else, the download is free, the suite is awesome, give it a try. It will change your mind about what to pay for a good office suite!