Jan Mar May Jul Sep Nov Feb Apr Jun Aug Oct Dec Recent Developments .. Apr 2005 by Roger Davies Soft Serve Direct Magrath, Alberta T0K 1JO Phone (403) 388-4332 Email  news@ssdirect.com

'R.D.D.'

OpenOffice.org - It's a winner!

We have switched, and don't miss M$ much at all. And it works great on both Linux and all Windows platforms! So, do you need a word processor but just can't justify or afford buying one of those expensive 'proprietary' Office Suite programs? Our survey this month of the retail cost for MS Office 2003 Standard is $495 Cdn and the Corel Office 12 is $375 Cdn (as per www.staples.ca) . You also pay tax and maybe shipping on top of that cost. The upgrade prices are about $290 and $215 respectively. And, remember, you STILL can only install it legally on a single machine at a time. Hmm. Compare that to this great and free open-source software from www.OpenOffice.org.

What Does it Do? It does pretty much everything that it's much more expensive competition does, except better amd it is free. OK, it is a 50MB download, so it will cost you some time to download, but you can get a copy from a friend with a high speed internet connection or buy a copy on a CD directly from the Open Office website. The suite includes fully-featured, commercial-quality programs for word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, and equation and drawing editing. It opens most major formats such as MS Office (except for macros but does much better than Corel can), has comprehensive online help and built-in spell-checking, generates PDF files directly, and can be installed on ALL your computers at no extra charge without worrying about licensing requirements. For details on major features see:

•   OpenOffice.org features: [ http://www.openoffice.org/dev_docs/source/features.html ]

Background: StarDivision, the original author of the StarOffice suite of software, was founded in Germany in the mid-1980s. It was acquired by Sun Microsystems during the summer of 1999 and StarOffice 5.2 was released in June of 2000 as free-ware. The OpenOffice.org source code initially includes the technology which Sun Microsystems has been developing for the future versions of StarOffice(TM) software. Future versions of StarOffice software, beginning with 6.0, will be built using the OpenOffice.org source, APIs, file formats, and reference implementation but will be sold as a commercial product while it's newly cloned brother OpenOffice.org will continue to be free open-source software.

We have used and recommended this software since StarOffice 5.1 and 5.2. The latest incarnation in OpenOffice version 1.1.4 is fast, powerful, and easy to use. And the new version 2.0 is in beta. Why don't you try it yourself?

Selected External Links:

•   OpenOffice.org download site: [ http://download.openoffice.org/1.1.4/home.html ]

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