Open Office had been installed on my desktop for close to a year now, begnning with the 1.9 beta version.

From my experience, Open Office is more than capable to handle all the day to day requirement of document processing of a small business owner.

Take a look at Writer, Calc and Impress, they can do all of what you have been doing with Word, Excel and Powerpoint.

Writer, Word replacement.

Calc, Excel replacement.

Impress, PowerPoint replacement.

I have Microsoft’s licensing and activation policy to thank for stiffening my resolve to turn to Open Office.

It was a long story, but it is suffice to say that I have a hard time trying to activate my original Office on a new harddisk. The end result? I gave up, decided to try Open Office and never turn back since. When push comes to shove, resistance to change became strength for change. Looking back I’m glad I made the switch.

The next time you think of buying or upgrading Microsoft Office, give Open Office a try.

What I like about it?

• Create PDF document natively
• Excellent support for Word and Excel format
• Effectively replaced MS Office

What can be improved

• Support for PowerPoint format on Impress
• Support for Access database on Base
• Provide Keystoke binding for Calc that maches Excel
  I learned so many Excel keystokes, it is ashame to have to relearn again

Chinese support

Simplified Chinese version of Open Office is available from http://zh.openoffice.org/index_gb.html

When visiting Openoffice.org using a Chinese system, the chinese page is automatically served and the respective download selected.

Where to get it?

• OpenOffice is at http://www.openoffice.org/
• Current version: 2.0.3
• Function: Office Productivity Suite

Related Post:

• OpenOffice Solutions