The answer is NO.

If there is one thing I hate in this computer world is when people send e-mail attachments of Microsoft Word, Excel, Powerpoint etc type documents and just assume every other user on the Internet can afford the $300 - $600 price tag of Microsoft Office. Personally I feel if you have a document you need to send to someone for viewing or printing, you should send it in Adobe PDF (Portable Document Format) format, but I’ll save that one for another day.

Today I’m going to tell you about a software product called Open Office. Open Office is “open source” software and is totally FREE and compatible with many Microsoft Office formats.

I personally use it for all my business needs and do not have Word, Excel or Power Point installed on my computer. I have received many documents from clients that were created in Office and Open Office has not let me down yet.

Now, Open Office by default saves documents in what is called an Open Document Format, which is not able to be viewed by Microsoft products, but one simple command can fix that for you. Let’s say for example you need to do a paper for school and pass it in to your teacher and include on disk the source file for the paper. Well, in Open Office, simply go to the “File” menu and select “Save As”. In your list of file types you can save as, you’ll see “Microsoft”! Once you do that, the document will take on the .DOC, .XLS or .PPS extension automatically. (Hint: I do recommend saving the documents in their default format and only doing a Save As if you need to pass it along to someone who has Office.)

You can download your on personal copy of Open Office by going to www.OpenOffice.org !

So the next time your kids teacher sends them home telling them they should use Word to do their term paper, tell them, no thanks, our friendly neighborhood computer geek has just saved us a few hundred bucks, and we use Open Office!

To bad the school system can’t wake up from the Microsoft trance and inform teachers, parents and students that there are free alternatives too!

My rant for the month.

Paul

Do you have a topic or problem you’d like me to write about here on my blog? If so, let me know and I’ll try my best to post something.

Send me a mail with your suggestions to paul.wesson AT gmail DOT com.

NOTE: I do plan in the future to discuss things like Picasa and Flickr, but I haven’t had time to really get into them yet.