Several weeks ago when I was getting ready to buy my new laptop, I started to research what it would cost me to buy a new laptop. What I quickly realized is that in addition to buying just the laptop itself, I am going to have to spend significantly for the software - Microsoft Office, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint and my favorite application Outlook; my development tools such as Visual Studio and SQL Server, anti-virus software etc. etc.
The MS Office suite costs about $500, not terribly expensive but definitely on the high side. Instead I decided it was time for me to try out OpenOffice - the open source word processing, spreadsheet and presentation authoring software. They even have a Access-like database and a couple of things beyond that. My experience has been very good so far. Not once have I had to go back and open a document or spreadsheet or PPT presentation in MS Office! I have gone out and done it just to make sure they look exactly the same - and they did every time. The user interface of the OpenOffice products is very similar to the Office XP suite of products. All the same options are available. They are pretty much in the same place an called pretty much the same thing too. Only thing I miss is the huge bank of templates that Microsoft makes available on it’s site.
I am sold on OpenOffice. I am going to give it 30 more days. If I don’t run in to any issues I am going to a) uninstall Office from my laptop, and b) make $$ contribution to OpenOffice.
MS Word –> OpenOffice Writer
MS Excel –> OpenOffice Calc
MS PowerPoint –> OpenOffice Impress`
If you are interested in learning more about our authors, you can choose from the list to the right. An avid developer and technology leader, Amol helps marketers with CRM, e-mail marketing & automation. Most recently, Amol was responsible for an open API at leading email marketing firm ExactTarget. He is currently the VP of Technology at Right On Interactive. Read more from this authorRelated posts:
March 27th, 2007 at 6:21 am
Regarding to laptops i just read an interesting article about the world most expensive laptop 1 MIL $ i say that this is outrageous. http://anar.110mb.com/?p=46
March 27th, 2007 at 9:05 am
Open office is awesome…Im glad that you found it useful! I have heard of companies swtiching over to free or all open source applications to run their business - open office, google apps, sugar CRM…its an interesting concept…
March 28th, 2007 at 9:52 am
[…] by Amol Dalvi on March 28th, 2007 Luke Newton (who has his own blog here) made a good comment about my earlier post. Luke mentioned how several companies are switching over to free or open […]