Open office or OO.o is a free office application suite.It is now owned by oracle which recently purchased from Sun Microsystems.From my own experience i found that it is a lot better in a numerous ways. And the best part is that it is free for everyone and we dont have to pay 300$ for it.Its sourcecode is open to all to modify and edit,which opens up a great oppurtunity for the programming freaks.

OpenOffice.org is an a must have software package.And for most people is a suitable replacement for Microsoft Office.It contains ‘writer’  which  is not just a word processor, but also offers spreadsheet functionality roughly equivalent to Excel, a presentation program (Impress)which is, more or less, comparable to Power Point.Calc is excelent spreadsheet program which is capable of doing anything that excel offer you .In addition, OpenOffice.org now contains a built-in relational database application similar to MS Access.

Another cool feature of openoffice is  is its ability to work with many other office suite file formats. You can save your documents as MS Word (or many other) documents and they will open up just as you intended in Word.You can also convert your file to pdf format in just a click when using ‘writer’.

writer in action

One of the suite’s most useful features are its wizards, which walk you through creating spreadsheets, presentations, and other documents.OpenOffice works with an extremely wide variety of formats, including the OpenDocument Format (ODF) 1.2 standard, as well as documents created in Microsoft Office 2007 and Office 2008 for the Mac. You can even export files to PDF.

So why you waiting???  switch over to openoffice.Save 300$ and be proud to be a part of opensource community.