This afternoon, Ponzi asked me to install Office on one of our laptops so that we could use Excel and Word on it. Easy enough to do, right? All I had to do was find the CD, right? Well, I couldn’t find it – and I’m pretty certain all of my Office activations have been used up, anyway (especially now that I no longer have access to an MSDN account).

As I was digging through my software drawer, I started to think… do I really need to use Microsoft Office – or will OpenOffice do just fine for desktop productivity? Let’s think about this for a moment. OpenOffice.org is free software:

• you may download OpenOffice.org completely free of any license fees
• install it on as many PCs as you like
• use it for any purpose – private, educational, government and public administration, commercial…
• pass on copies free of charge to family, friends, students, employees, etc.

Writer, for the most part, is like Word – and Calc, for the most part, is like Excel. That’s all I really need on this laptop. Guess I can kiss Microsoft Office on ancillary machines good-bye? Forget about limited editions and 60-day timeouts, man. I don’t know if I could live my life on the desktop without Microsoft Office at this point (especially with Outlook playing such a pivotal role)… what about you?

OpenOffice vs. Microsoft Office