Open Office Suite 3.0

The newest free version of Open Office's business software suite that provides most of the capabilities of MS Office was released in October 2008.

Open Office provides a very complete set of basic features that will cover about 90% of the typical MS Office users. It does not have the tight linkages with an e-mail client like MS Offices has with MS Outlook but if that is not a show stopper requirement then I think you will find Open Office a very good product.

If you are not using MS outlook then you might also consider using Thunderbird E-mail client with the Lighting Calendar add-in which is also free open source software that has thousands of happy users.

The Pro for this product are

1. It is free thus your licensing cost goes to $0.


2. It has a complete suite of the most demanded programs; word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, draw, and database.


3. A growing number of free 3rd party add-ons, templates, and clip-art are available.


4. Very compatible with MS Office files. It is nearly impossible to be completely compatible but Open Office does a very good job of getting close. Presentations are the area where when importing/exporting to MS office the objects need to be re-positioned.


5. Open Office has built in capability to save a file as a PDF file. Useful if you are not sure that the other person receiving your document can read the file.

The Con for this product are:

1. Very few people have been trained on Open Office Suite so there is a learning curve that you must go through to get going.


2. You will not usually have a friend, family member, or other person that you can get help from for free .


3. If you have done a lot of work with macros in MS Excel they do not convert well to Open Office. There is a specific version of Open Office that claims to be able to do a better job of using your original macros so you might want to look at them if this is a problem.

 Open Office does have a good users' forum and a number of free tutorials are available from 3rd parties which can be found on Open Office website.