At long last, freedom from Redmond in a package that rivals MicroSoft Office. It started many years ago as StarOffice, then grew into the robust office suite, the OpenOffice.org freeware. As with so many small businesses, spending $200-$400 USD (or more) every year to upgrade Office had become an annoying ritual. A disastrous harddrive failure and reinstall brought the matter to a head when the MS Office disk containing MS Word XP was found to be too damaged to use. Initial thoughts involved spending $115 USD for MS Word and installing the rest of the disks - then reality set in. The only parts really needed were MS Word and PowerPoint. The other parts had been used only two or three times over five years. Being able to share or open documents was very important, but the cost had become exorbitant. MS Word and PowerPoint were being used a lot, many times a week, the other parts almost never.

A memory of reading reviews about the freeware OpenOffice.org suite caused a quick journey to their site. The overt geekiness of the site was actually comforting. These people had a killer application and a no nonsense site to promote it. The basic complete program was a mere 52M download (Windows version). An hour later it was installed and ready for testing.

The next morning an emergency contract came in using MS Word's .doc format. OpenOffice.org's Writer opened it effortlessly (undamaged), allowed easy changes where needed, then the finished version was E.Mailed off. The other office made a few more changes (using MS Word), then sent it back. A few minor changes later a finished form was done using OpenOffice.org's Writer and printed. A copy of the .doc it made was sent to the original office who also printed a copy. Screenshots and printed copies were nearly identical.

Experimenting with OpenOffice.org's Impress revealed it as an excellent PowerPoint clone. Other individual programs within the OpenOffice.org suite perform similarly powerfully. The Draw program can even do static SVG graphics. OpenOffice.org is highly recommended, not just as an opportunity to blow raspberries at Redmond, but as a chance to get an excellent freeware suite that opens and understands both standard and MS proprietary formats in office documents. Having shared MS proprietary formats in an emergency situation already, it really does work and it works very well. For free.