Writers, especially beginning writers, often don’t have money to spend on OpenOfficesoftware and equipment for their writing projects. Experienced writers may get tired of spending money of software upgrades to keep in step with the publishing industry. Microsoft Word has become the standard for the publishing industry, and keeping up with the upgrades is a challenge.

 

The solution? Open Office 3.1.0.

 

It’s “open source,” which means it’s FREE. It’s a software suite that functions much like MS Office. Included are a word processor (files interchange with Word), spreadsheet (like Excel), presentation software (similar to Powerpoint), database (Access), and a draw program.

 

Video on new features: http://www.openoffice.org/dev_docs/features/3.1/index.html

 

Although I have MS Office 2007, I wanted to test-drive Open Office, so I downloaded the suite. Warning: if you decide to download it, give yourself plenty of time. It took my system between 45 minutes and an hour to download everything. I can’t say that I’ve done a complete evaluation, but I wrote this post in OO Writer, and, so far, it seems to work like Word. You’ll need to get used to the toolbars and menus, but that’s a small price to pay for free software, in my opinion. I tested some of my old Excel files on the spreadsheet program, and I had no trouble opening or saving the files after editing them. I don’t use presentation, database, or draw programs much, so I can’t evaluate them. However, you don’t have to take my word for it. Here’s a review from the Computer World blog.

 

http://blogs.computerworld.com/review_of_final_openoffice_3_why_buy_microsoft_office

 

I asked some of my writer friends for input on Open Office, and I got this from Tracy Crump.

“I began using Open Office when I joined my first online critique group. In my experience, the comments/track changes features, essential for online critiquing, work as well as MS Word although there are some differences. Open Office uses different terms, which may take some getting used to for those accustomed to Word. The comments (or “notes” as they’re called by Open Office) appear as tiny yellow boxes you mouse over to see instead of comment balloons in the margins. I actually like the box method better—the comments only appear as you need them, and it’s easier to tell which part of the sentence it applies to.

 

The only problem I’ve had with critiquing is that an occasional critiquer’s comments won’t show up as boxes. I get around that by printing out the comments with the “print-options-notes only” feature and compare them by line number. We’ve never determined why some critiquers’ comments don’t show up, but others who use Word have also complained of sporadic problems, especially when using laptops.”

 

If you’ve been thinking about upgrading your software suite, don’t spend any money until you have tried Open Office. You can download it (free) here:

 

http://download.cnet.com/OpenOffice-org/3000-18483_4-10263109.html

 

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