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Free Productivity Software Page 1

Office Suite Software
(Word Processing, Spreadsheets, Database, Presentations etc)

You don't need to spend hundreds of dollars on Microsoft Office to get a good office suite. So many people think the need MS Office when they buy a new computer but the funny thing is that most people don't even need the power of MS Office and most people are totally ignorant of the fact that there are a number of free office suites available.

OpenOffice.org is a very well featured office suite that can even do a trick or two that MS Office can’t and is also MS Office compatible – this means that you can open your Word, Excel, PowerPoint etc documents in it and save to the same MS Office compatible formats!

OpenOffice.org is open source software.

OpenOffice.org (I’ll refer to it simply as OpenOffice from hereon) is a powerful office suite of programs including Writer (a word processor), Calc (a spreadsheet program), Impress (a presentation program), Draw (a drawing program) and coming up with the coming release of OpenOffice 2.0 (now in beta testing) is Base (you guessed it, a database program).

According to the website ‘The suite covers pretty much everything you need with a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation software, equation editor and a drawing program. It opens most major formats such as MS Office almost flawlessly (Macros aren't converted), saves to PDF, has comprehensive help, and spellchecking in 15 languages.’

To download OpenOffice point your browser to www.openoffice.org and download the latest stable version which at time of writing is 2.0.4. If you’re game you can download the latest test release but bear in mind that although there will be added features they will come at a cost of less stability.

Within this suite of programs some very powerful features. You can read a complete rundown of the features on the OpenOffice website at and view a graphical presentation of the main features.

As mentioned previously, one of the exceptional features is the ability to export documents to PDF from within the program – a feature unmatched in MS Office. Some of the other more noteworthy features are:

The ‘versions’ system which allows collaborators to work on the same document on different computers and see what has changed and by whom.
Extensive desktop publishing functionality
Indexing and Bibliography features
Ability to export as Macromedia Flash SWF file from Impress
Highly capable drawing program (Draw)

OpenOffice may be used for both personal and business use. When you first run it you will be asked to register but this is entirely optional.

Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows 2000 (Service Pack 2 or higher), Windows XP, Windows 2003
128 Mbytes RAM
200 Mbytes available disk space
800 x 600 or higher resolution with at least 256 colors

OpenOffice.org is multiplatform with versions available for Windows, Solaris, Linux/Unix and MacOS

Download it from: http://www.openoffice.org

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productivity software index

Office Suite Software (Word Processing, Spreadsheets, Database, Presentations etc)

Office Suite Software
(Word Processing, Spreadsheets, Database, Presentations etc)