Today, with our economic woes, everyone is looking to save money. Now is a perfect time to try a few open source, software completely free and downloadable. There is no better place to start that Open Office, a free clone of the infamous Microsoft Office Suite of programs, which contains programs such as Excel, Word and PowerPoint. What better way to soup up your cheap laptop but with some free software?
Now that you know Open Office is free, why spend $150 cost to buy MS Office? Then the periodic improvements for $100 each time? Open Office also has free updates. Just download the latest version and you are set. Like MS Office, Open Office is multilingual and cross-platform. This means that Mac users, Linux users, Windows users, etc. can all use this program for free. Perhaps this unite the world in peace and love! You can download the latest version 3.1, released in October 2009. Choose only your favorite web browser and search for "Download Open Office 3.1" and you certainly find many places to download this great piece of software. Now you can display on your cheap laptop with pride, because you have been smart and registered your pennies for, lets say that his vacation.
Like MS Office, you will find a called writer word processor, a spreadsheet Calc, software presentation called Impress and Base, the database manager. It is not a clone for Outlook to read e-mail. With the latest version 3.1, anti-aliasing is used, making all images, text and menus look much more marked than previous versions. He was also a buzz on this version much faster than previous versions, running with programs taking half the time to load than before. You can now use extensions to add functionality to Open Office, such as adding spelling to your word processor (Writer). By downloading and adding LanguageTool, you will find a breeze of spell checking.
Calc spreadsheet, has been enhanced in the latest version of Open Office. Formulas now take less than half the time to compile from the previous version. This makes Calc a formidable opponent to the pricey MS Excel. Beware of Microsoft! The Open source programming is out!
Clone of PowerPoint from the open Office Impress, provides no functionality as PowerPoint, but only the minimal functionality that you find in PowerPoint. If you are a heavy user of PowerPoint, Impress may not be the best choice for you.
For the budget conscious that the search of inexpensive software for their portable good market, it is obvious. Any person who has enough to pay each year for the largest and the most recent MS Office version, please do yourself a favour and Open Office a test. I think that you will be pleasantly surprised.