I'm always torn between an Industry stand and competition. On the one hand it is really nice that almost everyone uses Microsoft Office. If someone offers to send you a document, a spreadsheet, or a picture you're like to get it in .doc, .xls, and .jpg respectively. And if you have Windows and Microsoft Office you should be able to open all of these documents unless they have been further password protected the program. But I also think that competition also is good because it keeps people looking over theire should and trying to bring out new services before the competition does.
It was thus with a little interest and more chagrin that I received in my email today three files with the file extension .ods. It looked like the time had come to look at the Open Office system. For those who haven't heard, Open Office is a free program that matches the functions of Microsoft Office.
Loading the program was a snap. You'll find it here. The slowest part will probably be the download as it must transfer 181 MegaByles. At least it was for me. I'm going to play around with Open Source for a couple of weeks and report back.
If any of my readers have had experience with Open Source software and especially Office, would you please share that experiends with the rest of us.
I have used Open Office before and have found it very good. I can't really say that it was better or worse than windows products because I don't do enough fancy things to notice much difference. I also didn't play with the source really.
ReplyDeleteIt is nice if you ever use a Linux machine, but I haven't used one of those in years.