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'R.D.D.'
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penOffice.org - I'd rather switch than fight.
Do you need a word processor but just can't justify or afford buying one of
those expensive Office Suite programs? Our survey this month of the retail cost
for MS Office Standard is $700 Cdn and the Corel Office Suite 2002 is $220 Cdn
(as per www.staples.ca)
. You also pay tax and maybe shipping on top of that cost. And, remember, you
can then only install it legally on a single machine at a time. Hmm.
Compare that to this great and free open-source software from www.OpenOffice.org.
What Does it Do? It does pretty much everything that it's much more
expensive competition does, except it is free. OK. it is a 50MB download, so it
will cost you some time to download, but you can get a copy from a friend like
me or buy a copy on a CD directly from the Open Office website. The suite
includes fully-featured, commercial-quality programs for word processing,
spreadsheet, presentation, and equation and drawing editing. It opens most major
formats such as MS Office (except for macros but much better than Corel can),
has comprehensive online help and built-in spell-checking, and can be installed
on all your computers without worrying about licensing requirements. For details
on major features see:
Background: StarDivision, the original author of the StarOffice suite
of software, was founded in Germany in the mid-1980s. It was acquired by Sun
Microsystems during the summer of 1999 and StarOffice 5.2 was released in June
of 2000 as free-ware. The OpenOffice.org source code initially includes the
technology which Sun Microsystems has been developing for the future versions of
StarOffice(TM) software. Future versions of StarOffice software, beginning with
6.0, will be built using the OpenOffice.org source, APIs, file formats, and
reference implementation but will be sold as a commercial product while it's
newly cloned brother OpenOffice.org will continue to be free open-source
software.
We have used and recommended this software since StarOffice 5.1 and 5.2. The
latest incarnation in OpenOffice version 1.0.2 is StarOffice improved - fast,
powerful, and easy to use. Why don't you try it yourself?
Selected External Links:
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