Open Office from Sun Microsystems, is a free, feature rich suite of office applications including Word Processing, Spreadsheets, Presentations, Graphics and Database modules. The product has been around for many years and is available free under an Open Source Licence.
The beauty of Open Office is that it will happily co-exist alongside MS Office and it can be set up to use Microsoft document formats by default. This means that others can open and read your documents without any issues, or indeed without even knowing that you are using Open Office. Our individual articles cover the features of different elements of the suite, but in general the package is a perfect example of how small businesses can get to use industry standard applications for free, whilst remaining legal and compliant with legislation.
The package can be downloaded from the Open Office site and you can be up and running very quickly as it very much follows standard windows conventions in terms of menus, icons etc. There is a very active online community and any questions will be easily answered by visiting the open office support pages or keying a query into your favourite search engine.
The equivalent market leading products will cost approximately $300 dollars per user, so a five user set up would save $1500 and could upgrade for free when a new version becomes available.
Key Benefits
All the features required for 99% of office staff
Full comaptability with file formats from Microsoft Office
Ability to share documents with MS Office users, e.g. clients, suppliers.
