Why You Do Not Need To Purchase Microsoft Office
Are you faced with the decision of paying to activate your Microsoft Office? Read below to get all the capabilities of Office and to save yourself some money.
What to do
- Download and install (for free) OpenOffice. Click on the green ‘get OpenOffice.org’ button to begin the download process.
Note: OpenOffice (like Microsoft Office) is a large file, so be patient while downloading- it may take a while, especially if you have a slow internet connection.
- Once it’s installed, you have a fully functional Office suite (for free).
A little more
If you are like most people, chances are you use MS Office in some way, shape, or form every day. Programs like MS Word, Excel, and PowerPoint have become ubiquitous in today’s society. And most of us fall into the ‘it’s there’ trap - MS Office comes with our Windows machine, it’s on everyone else’s machine, and thus we figure that we should use only MS Office to run our daily lives.
However, for many people there is an issue - MS Office is expensive.
OpenOffice is a great alternative for those who don’t want to pay for MS Office, or those who can’t pay for MS Office, but would like to be able to do everything MS Office allows them to do. If you use MS Office programs, chances are you will be able to very intuitively pick up OpenOffice programs.
OpenOffice is provided free to the world by Sun Microsystems, the same company that developed Java (for this article, it’s not important to know what Java is - what is important is that if you use a modern Windows machine, chances are you have some Java on your computer all ready).
Here’s what you need to know: for the most part, you can open MS Office documents with OpenOffice, and you can save MS Office compatible documents (like the famous .doc format) with OpenOffice. That means that you can share documents between MS Office programs and OpenOffice. We say for the most part, because OpenOffice cannot open some older version of MS Office files (for example, OpenOffice can’t open PowerPoint 95 files).
We recommend OpenOffice for everyone - but we especially recommend OpenOffice for non-power users, or people who use Word for basic word processing and maybe PowerPoint for presentations. If that’s all you do, we suggest getting OpenOffice for free and saving yourself some money.
For Example: We Find a Lot of People in the Following Situation
Say you just got a new computer. The computer comes with Microsoft Office. Once you open up any of the MS Office programs for the first time, you probably can use the full version of the Office programs for a trial period before the features downgrade and you have to pay to activate the software.
If you’re like most people we know, you’ve probably hooked up your new computer to the Internet pretty quickly. So, here’s what we recommend.
Download and install OpenOffice (for free) onto your computer.
Play around with it. See if it opens your current word files and excel files, etc. See if you can use the software pretty easily.
If you like OpenOffice, no need to purchase MS Office. Now you’ve saved yourself that activation fee! (Remember, you can always pay to activate MS Office at a later date if you want.)
If you don’t like OpenOffice, activate your MS Office, and uninstall OpenOffice.
You can learn more about OpenOffice at the OpenOffice About Us page.
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John
Said this on March 8th, 2007 at 9:52am:I really increased my PC’s speed by unistalling Microsoft Office. A consideration if you don’t have a lot of RAM.