[ lofo’s weblog ]

I read in the ‘Letters’ section of CE News magazine last week about an engineering firm that had begun using a suite of programs called Open Office in place of Microsoft Office. Open Office is a suite of programs much like Microsoft Office but with a few very important and distinct differences. The first, which we all will love, is that it is free! Yes, you heard me right, I said… FREE! However, the second distinct thing about this software is that it is a collaboration of many people volunteering their time to develop the software by coding, finding bugs, providing support, marketing it, etc. It is developed using open source code which is code freely shared by many many developers to make the programs. Also, the software is able to open, read, and write to many document formats including any Microsoft Office document. That’s why it is called Open Office. The software is based on a file format called Open Document Format which you can learn more about from Open Office’s ‘In the media’ section on the right side of their main page. I’m just learning about the software and it’s capabilities myself. I just downloaded the full suite at the Open Office website and plan to start using it and quite possibly giving my own input at some point when I become more familiar with the software. While the software is free you are encouraged to donate either monetarily to the success of the software or by some other method of contribution such as coding, marketing it, burning CD’s and giving them out, etc. All I can say is Hurrah!… I feel excited about the software’s potential to rival the expensive Microsoft version and am so glad that this wonderful alternative is available. So, what are you waiting for… go download it and get busy making spreadsheets, presentations, databases, art, and letters! Then tell a friend and contribute!