OpenOffice.org

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[public post]

Get Legal - Get OpenOffice.org
Is your office software legal? According to figures published by Microsoft, 35% of the software in the world is thought to be counterfeit or otherwise illegal.

After years of unofficially tolerating piracy as a means of securing market share, Microsoft is now going on the offensive to make sure copies of it's software are legitimate.

• It has just bought a software company specialising in detecting what software is installed on PCs.
• It is now using the internet to put piracy detection software into copies of MS-Office on people's PCs.
• around the world, the Business Software Alliance is setting up schemes to prosecute offenders - for example, in the UK it is offering large cash rewards to anyone who informs against organisations.
• Microsoft's licence agreements are complicated - it's easy to break them by mistake.

If you have a copy of MS-Office at work, at school, at home - are you sure where it came from?

Fortunately, there is a completely legal and free alternative. OpenOffice.org 2 is a fully-featured office suite, similar in functionality to MS-Office. OpenOffice.org 2 does everything you need: word processing, spreadsheets, presentations and much more. It can even use MS-Office format files (.doc, .xls, .ppt), so you don't need to re-type your work. What's more, it does things MS-Office does not, such as create pdf files to give to other people.

If you can use MS-Office, you can use OpenOffice.org 2. Studies have shown it is ten times cheaper to move to OpenOffice.org 2 than it is to upgrade to MS-Office 2007.

A poll has indicated 86% of users would prefer to try OpenOffice.org 2 rather than buy MS-Office 2007.

So what are you waiting for? It costs nothing to try. If you like it, OpenOffice.org 2 costs nothing to use for as long as you like, wherever you like. Peace of mind at no cost.




All in all, I'm quite happy with OpenOffice.org. The switch from MS Office to Open Office.org is an easy one. The program inside OpenOffice.org are set up pretty much the same as Othe ones in Office. After using it for a little while, the few changes there are made more sense to me and ended up being seeming a little more intuitive to me. And since OpenOffice.org is capable of opening and saving files in Office formats, you don't need to worry about having to recreate your documents, or worry about your documents being compatible with someone who is using Office. OpenOffice.org also allows you to export your files as .pdf files. With Office, you need to pay extra for that plug-in.

Anyway, I'm slowly moving over to a more Open Source outlook on software. Not only is it going to save me money, but I feel a little better knowing I'm not "stealing" software. I do still have a little bit of a way to go before I'm completely legal, but I'm working on it.

So, what other open source software am I using right now?

1. I'm switching over from Photoshop CS to the GIMP. If you're already familiar with Photoshop, then you're mostly familiar with the GIMP. There's a tiny learning curve as not everything is handled the exact same (layers, for example) but in general they have the same features.
2. I've used IrfanView for quite a while as a slightly more than basic image viewer. With it you can view, optimize, convert, scan, print, create slideshows and so on, with almost any image format available. It's not really open source software, but it is freeware.
3. GnuCash is a program I bumped into recently, but haven't had a chance to test. It's an open source accounting program similar to either Quicken or Quickbooks. The newest versions add support for small business accounting. I should mention that right now it's not available for Windows, but is available for *nix versions and Mac's.
4. I've been using AVG Free Edition for a couple or more years now. It doesn't bog down your system anywhere as much as Norton or McAfee products and I have had one whole virus on my computer in the years I've been using AVG. And I've explored many a questionable website in search of keygens and pirated software. AVG is another piece of software that isn't open source, but is freeware.
5. Operating systems are another group of highly pirated pieces of software. How many people who's computer didn't come with XP are actually running XP? Or any other version of Windows? I am now spending more time in Ubuntu than I am in XP. One bonus to that is that the various versions of Linux are more secure and less prone to viruses. Another bonus is the fact that they're fully functional operating systems and are less costly than XP. Ubuntu is free, and there are other free ones out there as well.
   The only issue I'm having with Ubuntu is that I can't get my media players to connect to my music across a network.. and that's more because I know nothing about connecting to SMB servers. Once I learn how to set up a good Linux file server that XP and OS X (because Mel bought a 'new-to-her' iBook) can connect to, I'll switch the file server over to Linux and no more issue. :)
   I think the main thing that is keeping the Linux OSs from going completely main stream is that they're not easy enough to use and setup for your average computer user. If they went mainstream then I'm quite sure many software manufacturers would make more software that ran natively in Linux.... but I digress... :o)

Anyway, open source software is good... pirating is bad. Mind you, until they make a version of Guild Wars that runs on Ubuntu, I'm kind of stuck using XP. Heck... I may even need to buy a legit copy of it... Click the OpenOffice.org button up there, read about it, and then install it on your computer. I think you'll like it. :o)