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In my consulting business, I spend a lot of paid time researching technology, vendors, trends and strategies for clients. One of the largest requests over the last year includes ‘help me cut costs’.
Ok.
One way to do that is by cutting back on the license fees you pay software vendors. You can do that by illegally copying their software on unlicensed computers. I do not recommend that and never will. Its against the law.
Why should you as an author, writer or potential author care?
- To cut your costs of writing
- To have excellent and free tools
- To have the option of using industry standard .doc, .xls or .ppt file formats
I have recently had a spate of new authors try to send me their ebooks to put into PDF format, which is one of our service offerings. In all cases, they sent me their file in some obscure file format such as Wordperfect or others.
Many authors use the Macintosh computer and do not have Microsoft Office, so they find a word processor which will work on the Mac and not think about what 85% of the rest of the world uses: the Microsoft .doc file format (from Microsoft Word).
The Free Story
About 3 years ago, a couple of fellows in England came along that offered some bright promises to the computer software market. Their name? StarOffice.
They had developed a basic set of tools including a word processor, a spreadsheet, a database and a presentation graphic package. It was developed and licensed under the GNU open source license, which meant it was free.
StarOffice gathered quite a bit of attention for their efforts to offer a free alternative to Microsoft’s Office franchise line of software. StarOffice was in the press every week, but of course it was the height of the dot com run.
I don’t remember exactly when, but about a year ago it seems, Sun Microsystems purchased the intellectual property of StarOffice, put some resources behind it and let them loose.
The result? A new name, Open Office, a new website and a suddenly massive following of bright developers around the globe contributing their software engineering to the project.
So earlier this year I re-examined the software package. Wow! They have come a long way since my first evaluation of StarOffice 3 years ago.
Get Yours Today
Their website is at www.openoffice.org. This toolset is targeted straight at Microsoft. Given Sun’s long and ongoing legal battles with Microsoft over Java, it appears that Sun has hit a winner. A winner in the sense this product is already cutting into Microsoft’s income stream.
This product line promises to be the first challenger in over 7 years to thwart Microsoft’s hegemony on the desktop productivity tools market.
I’ve tested the OpenOffice line of tools extensively this year. I’ve use them to open, edit, save and re-edit Word docs, Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations.
I have fairly normal use of these software packages. But, in testing, all the formatting in the OpenOffice word processor came across in MS Word. All the formulas in the OpenOffice spreadsheet (have some sheets with a hundred formulas and cross linked worksheets) all came across, and the same with the presentations.
This is an excellent free tool set that you can download and use today. They have versions for Windows, MacOS and Unix, further making the cross-platform utilization even more compelling.
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