Office suite

Microsoft Office has been the standard for word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations for a number of years. Microsoft gained their top position by being the dominant operating system provider and not necessary by providing the best product. I still remember when everyone used Corel Word Perfect for all word processing. If you take a look at Word Perfect today, you will see that Microsoft Word is in no way superior to it. The biggest disadvantage to Microsoft Office is the price. The full Office Professional 2007 costs $495.95 and Office Home and Student 2007 costs $149.95. This is a lot of money especially considering you can get a fantastic laptop for about $500 these days. Anyway, times have changed completely. Sun Microsystem has a free open source office suite called Open Office. The Open Office suite can do pretty much the same things the Microsoft Office suite can do. In fact Open Office is fully compatible with Microsoft Office. Open Office can open your Word Documents, Powerpoint Presentation, Excel Spreadsheets, and Access Database files. The files you create with Open office will also work on Microsoft Office. The user interface of the programs in the Open Office Suite are very similar to that of Microsoft Office. At work you will probably use Microsoft Office and that is fine because your company pays for it. However, at home I see little reason to fork out money to Microsoft when Open Office is such a good solution. Microsoft Office is also continually vulnerable to all manners of security flaws as well. This is due to two reasons: Microsoft will always have a huge bulls eye on themselves because of their top position and Microsoft's shameless marketing tactics. For example, why does Word, Excel, and Powerpoint always need to access to internet to send Microsoft your usage data? If they want to survey you, Microsoft should give you the option to choose whether you want to participate. Open office can be downloaded from this link.