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Having recently had a good look at the Australian retail prices for Microsoft Office 2007, one could be forgiven for thinking that Microsoft believes that open source software is just a passing fad.
Yes, I know that Microsoft believes Office
2007 is 10 years ahead of Open Office.org 2.0, but there are some of us
who believe that Office 97 was six years ahead of Office 2003. Well not
really, but certainly for most of my purposes, it was just as good.
For
those of you who don't know, there is a free open source software
package called Open Office.org 2.0.4, which can be downloaded from
www.openoffice.org. This excellent package costs not one cent and is about
95% compatible with Microsoft Office 2003.
This free open source
package includes a word processor, a presentation package like
Powerpoint, a spreadsheet, a drawing package, a database and
mathematical function creator. Oh, and, unlike Office 2007, it also
allows you to save files in both Word 2003 and PDF format.
It's
true that if you have some really complicated spreadsheets and the like
in Office 2003, they may not work in Open Office.org - or so I'm told.
However, every Office 2003 application I have tried to access on my
hard drive using Open Office.org 2.0 has worked fine.
Of course,
if like me you're using Office 2003 there's no reason to change to Open
Office.org. There is also no reason to pay A$399 for upgrades to
Microsoft Office Standard 2007, A$599 for Microsoft Office Professional
2007 or a whopping A$939 for Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007. Why
change, if what you've got does the job?
Then again, if you're
buying a new computer and you don't have a copy of Microsoft Office
2003 that you can legally install, then you might baulk at paying A$249
for Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007, A$690 Microsoft Office
Standard 2007 and so on, up to the incredible A$1150 Microsoft Office
Ultimate 2007.
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