Open Office - Full Office Suite for home and small businesses

Open Office
http://www.openoffice.org
Windows 2000/XP/20003/Vista, Solaris, Linux, Mac OS X

Open Office is what is called an Open Source program. This means that the program is free for anyone to use in any manner they desire – even for running a business.

Open Office is a full office suite program that includes:

• Writer – Writer is a very user friendly word processor that allows you to create written documents as simple as a basic letter or as complex as any desktop publishing program on the market today.
• Calc – Calc is Open Office's spreadsheet program and is fast to learn for anyone that has any experience with spreadsheet programs, even those who have no experience (like me) will pick up on how to create basic spreadsheets in no time at all. You can create multiple pages in a Calc document and use the SUM formulas to display a total from one sheet on a separate sheet, allowing you to create separate sheets for each month and compile the totals for each on the first page.
• Impress – Create multimedia presentations with both 2D and 3D artwork as well as animations, multi-pane views and create PDF, HTML or Flash presentations.
• Draw – I use GIMP, so have not had much experience with the Open Office art program. The little I have seen of its capabilities have been impressive, so I recommend anyone that will be creating presentations with Open Office investigate the Draw feature.
• Base – Another part of Open Office I have little experience with, the Base allows you to manipulate a database and create tables, forms and reports.

The very nature of Open Office allows the average user to be a member of the creative team. If you need a feature that Open Office does not have, it is as easy as either getting in touch with someone in the design community that can assist you in bringing the feature to the program, or even (if you have the programming skill to do it) accessing the source code and programming the feature in yourself. Yes, that's right, the source code for Open Office is as free as the program itself.

Sounding too good to be true? Afraid there might be some kind of catch I have overlooked? Open Office has over 20 years of development behind it and uses the Open-Source license, which means that the program is and always will be 100% free. A freedom that can never be revoked.

I stronly encourage you to investigate Open Office (http://www.openoffice.org/) before you consider buying any office suite. 100,000,000 downloaders can't all be wrong.