Office 2007 prices Microsoft's Waterloo?

Stan Beer
Monday, 06 November 2006 10:43

Opinion and Analysis

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.