Out MS Office, Welcome openOffice.org

With MS Office Professional priced so high I had to consider alternatives. Personally I like Office - but sometimes it can be an overkill with so many features bumped into it and pricing it at what it is today. Wish we can get a simple editor that does the same job as what Word does - openOffice.org hit me hard in the head. I never really felt so much for the open world as I always thought the software would be of inferior quality (guys, please don't whack me, forgive me). But now I thought its high time I stopped paying money for the overloaded MS-Office and try out the free openOffice.org and gain some respect in the freeware world.

My only fear was - "Would be completely compatible with the current MS-Office documents I have?" Hmmm, the only option left was to try it rather than keep reading reviews that it was perfectly compatible. Finally I made the call - I installed the openOffice.org suite and was pretty impressed with what those folks have done. Word is now called Writer, Excel is called as Calc, Powerpoint is called as Impress. Wow - nice names and for the first time I felt those names were definitely better than than what Microsoft had named theirs. The installation was a breeze and everything looked fine.

After installation was completed I did try to open a few of my documents and found it was not 100% compatible. Then I thought - "Who cares?" If I can get to open my docs then it is fine. I quickly customized the programs to save automatically in MS compatible formats and I hope it really works as it claims it will be. I was pretty impressed at this I started to love this program that I began gaining interest in driving a similar project in Kannada as a localized project for Internationalization.

To be truthful, the main motivating factor in installing openOffice was my granddad. He needed some editor and spreadsheet utility in his laptop and he was not ready spend 300 bucks on Office. He has loved the SW so far and he has no clue what the differences are - he does not care! I have begun to use it extensively in my pamphlets and brochure creation for the temple and folks have not been complaining about any incompatibilities. Till the day I feel the dire need for MS-Office, openOffice.org is my hero. Until then MS-Office out and welcome openOffice.org!

Good job guys, I love you all.