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Without a doubt, you should try OpenOffice before deciding on a purchase.
Conversion to and from MS Office files is not always perfect. The interface is as fancy as on MS Office but who cares. You get office basics for virtually nothing!.
Drawing - A somewhat simple vector based drawing program. Writer - write documents will full support. The MS Office suite does not include a similar program (although Microsoft has one). Integrals, lower limits, powers and all sorts of mathematical symbols that you simply cannot produce in a document without drawing them. Math is a sweet program that has the tools you need to write mathematical formulas. You can of course create a serious presentation, print it and present it to an amphitheater or busyness meeting. You know, the kind that circulates between e-mail boxes with words of wisdom and photos of flowers. Impress facilitates the creation of animated slides. You can create complex formulas, use macro's, create charts and more. Meaning that they can open docx and xlsx files for instance, but they can also save files in those formats. It is important to note that OpenOffice programs are compatible with MS Office files. Writer does come with some extra features such as export to PDF and digital signature. The interface is similar to older versions of MS Word (before Microsoft poured all the buttons into different colored buckets). If you have ever used MS Word then you'll recognize OpenOffice Writer as a serious word processor. Drawing and Formula can enhance your documents with custom graphics and elegantly made mathematical formulas. With Base you can create database tables and queries. Impress is used for creating animated presentation slides. Writer and Calc take care of document writing and spreadsheet calculations. OpenOffice is a suite featuring six programs. ah well.ĭon't give up! Save your hard earned paper bills or digital ones and zeroes! There is a way! Sprung from the hearts of the community, OpenOffice is a slap to the monolith, and a right of every computer user on the planet!
Finally, one weekend you feel the need to organize your ever growing DVD collection. You come home one evening and decide you want to keep track of your expenses. Days pass, you enjoy your computer and start using it more, when you suddenly feel a bit frustrated for the lack of functions in WordPad. Since when has that become subscription based anyway? Also $400 for an Office package seems to be jumping the shark a bit. Besides you're not going to start paying a subscription just to be able to write documents. Do you need the MS Office suite? Nah, you can do without it. Imagine you have just set up your first Windows PC.