2BMobile

As a small business person I am always trying to save money, but I am not crazy enough to save money to the point of losing valuable features. There is a product that does not have all the bells and whistles of Microsoft's Office Suite nor its tight integration with an e-mail client like Outlook but for a solid word processor, spreadsheet and presentation maker, I think that Open Office 3.0 is a worth consideration.

Open Office 3.0 is a free open source software product that has even more features than a standard MS Office product offers. It comes with word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, Draw, Calc, and database module.

I have used it for the last couple months and find that it is a complete product. The biggest problem for me is the lack of generally available experts to help me figure out how to do things. Open Office has a user forum that seems to be responsive to the questions I asked, but it still took a day or two to get answers back to my questions.

If you already have a ton of marcos then this may not be a good solution but if you are starting out and do not have legacy marcos I would suggest taking a serious look at this product and save some money.

For Small Business Owners:

Because Open Office is provided under a Free Open Source license you can legally provide it to all your employees for free. For organizations that have many people that need to use office suite software this can add up to large up front savings, and over the years it will save you from the continued forced upgrades' costs of Microsoft's Office Suite product.

Reference

Open Office Website