Many of you have asked about an alternative to Microsoft Office. Some of you are concerned about the constant security holes, some about speed on your aging machine and some about the cost. The answer for all of these problems is OpenOffice.

OpenOffice is developed by a community of developers, working in their free time, in much the same way that Linux or Mozilla Firefox. OpenOffice runs on all major OSs (Windows, Mac, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris) and requires 64 MB of ram. So if your concern with you older computer is your office suite, you probably can get a couple more years out of the machine. OpenOffice includes program equivalents to Word (Writter), Excel (Calc), Picture It (Draw) and PowerPoint (Impress). But its much cooler then that, the entire OpenOffice suite is built with a powerful data system; it’s like having Microsoft Access embedded in every program, but better. In Access you save all of your files in .mdb files. Files are saved locally and cannot be shared across programs. In OpenOffice you can make data files just like in Access, but you can also post your work to your office enterprise data system. If you are one of my Unix using clients you probably already have a powerful database server, MySQL. MySQL is very stable but admittedly cryptic. But OpenOffice allows normal users in the network to connect, manage and merge with relative ease.

OpenOffice writes all of its files in normal MS Office formats, so your clients won’t even know you are using something different. But what really puts it over the top is its ability to export to PDF and SWF. As I stated in my last newsletter, you should never open an executable attachment in email and MS Office documents are executable. Well, you might be asking, what should I send my clients instead? The answer is Adobe PDFs. But in MS Office you would have had to spend $300 per seat to make this happen. Not in OpenOffice an “Export to PDF” is right in the file menu. Making Flash files are equally as simple.

And because its open source its free.