Microsoft Office is one of most widely recognized and used office software suites world wide. Most of us have used or are using currently. The problem has become what to use (especially at home), when MS Office isn't on the computer. As many of us know, to purchase MS Office for your computer can get very expensive. So are there any other options (especially free ones) that can open, edit and save office documents? The short answer is YES (and they are FREE)!!!!
There are two software packages that I like to use. OpenOffice and LibreOffice are both open sources packages. LibreOffice is actually an off shoot from OpenOffice. Both are great alternatives. They are easy to download and install. The both have pieces to create word documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. These can be saved as MS Office documents or the native ODF file format (there a # of other file formats that one can choose while saving documents).
One of the few consistent complaints that I get is that when you start either OpenOffice or LibreOffice for the first time, the software takes a minute to load so that you can start using it. Once the software has been loaded once, it opens quickly after that. Once the computer gets restarted, OpenOffice or LibreOffice will load slowly the first time you start it again. Trust me, it's barely even an inconvenience compared to the functionality of the two software packages.
My next post will discuss a couple of cloud computing options that can be used as an alternative to MS Office.
Tech G33k
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