Allotments 4 All

Don’t know if this is of any interest to any of you but it includes the word FREE so read on .... apologise if this has appeared before I'm new here!

If you can’t or in my case won’t pay Micro$oft huge sums of money for their Office program and you don’t want to run pirate software on your PC have a look at OpenOffice 2.

OpenOfffice is a free open source program that can do virtually everything and possibly more than MS office. I have been trialling it at work with a small user group and we are quite impressed.

All the info and the program can be downloaded at
http://www.openoffice.org/ - be warned it’s a large(ish) download

The suite has a word processor, spreadsheet, database, drawing program, presentation software and pdf integration.

Hope this is off use to some of you.

Ian

I like the look of this suite and I do like (and do use) open source and freeware as much as possible.  This looks to have some interesting features.  However, am I brave enough to ditch Office XP professional in favour of this or do I run them side by side?

What the world really needs is a really good quality open source GUI operating system that will rival Windows and bring MS down a ped or two.

Quote from: redclanger on January 02, 2006, 11:50:00
I like the look of this suite and I do like (and do use) open source and freeware as much as possible.  This looks to have some interesting features.  However, am I brave enough to ditch Office XP professional in favour of this or do I run them side by side?

What the world really needs is a really good quality open source GUI operating system that will rival Windows and bring MS down a ped or two.

Run them side by side (OO2 uninstalls witout messing up your system) as for O/S linux etc is getting there but people are reluctant to try free versions.
I admit I use Windows XP at home but  other than that it's open office and firefox / thunderbird and as many freebies as possible!

The best advice is to view the software with an open mind - most of the people/pc's I administrate just compare it too previous suites instead of forming an unbiased opinion.

Ian

Ooh that sounds interesting, I'll have a look. I too like free programmes, trouble is you do worry which are safe to try sometimes, don't you? Would be nice to see MS have a bit more competition.

I've used OpenOffice for a while now, and find it be just as functional and reliable as MS Office.  I think the Open Source concept is fantastic, and I hope more people will support this movement.

Also, the drawing package is handy for making a plan of the allotment!