alternatives to MS Office
When I got a new laptop last year (after having my old one stolen while traveling), I opted out of getting MS Office. The addition would have cost a couple hundred bucks, and the computer was already expensive.
I still needed to be able to make documents for school, though, as homework was one of the biggest reasons I got a laptop in the first place. Lucky for me, a computer friend hooked me up with a sweet deal: I have MS Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, and I use them all the time.
Still. All things considered, I’m wondering now if an even cooler deal would have been using alternative providers, via the Web. At writefly.com, for example, you can create and store documents online, even making it possible to share/collaborate with others. And through Google you can make documents, spreadsheets, even manage a calender similar to Outlook.
I just created a spreadsheet at Google for my April finance-managing. Coolest thing to me? no need to save it to my USB drive or desktop. It’s accessible anywhere there’s Internet.
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OpenOffice is an open source application that is compatible with MS Office formats (eg. you can save a file as .doc and then open it up with MS Word on another machine).
openoffice.org