Free Microsoft Office

[Aggie Hoopsfan]

Well, sort of.

http://www.openoffice.org

Check it out, it's a free, open source alternative to the Microsoft Office Suite - includes a text editor (Word), spreadsheet (Excel), presentation (PowerPoint), as well as HTML editor and image sketch program.

Just be sure when you save documents, you save as the appropriate file type (ex: .doc for Word, .xls for Excel, etc.).

I've played around with this some and it looks pretty cool. Loads a little slower than the true MS Word, etc., but you can't beat the price :spin

Probably the coolest feature is that any document you create you can save straight to a PDF.

Consider this AHF's tech tip for the week (don't forget to download the security patch that is located on their download page).

Have fun!

[timvp]

Yeah, I checked it out like a year and a half ago and it's pretty good. I have use it on one of our computers.

The Excel equivalent is pretty weak though, so I haven't been able to make a complete switch.

[duncan_21]

It's ok as a word processor. I just got the academic version of office 03 professional for $180.

[Useruser666]

It's ok as a word processor. I just got the academic version of office 03 professional for $180.

For $180?

My mom bought teacher student edition of Office 2003 for $99 at Best Buy last weekend. It comes with Excel, Word, Outlook, and Powerpoint. The licsense allows you to install it on three computers at a time too. That was pretty damn cheap to me.

[Aggie Hoopsfan]

It's ok as a word processor. I just got the academic version of office 03 professional for $180.

You got ripped. You can find the student/teacher edition for $100. The only way that is a decent value is if you got Access out of it.

If you attend a college or university, you should with its computer science dept. to see if they have any agreements with MS.

At A&M we got Office XP Pro for $20, and XP Pro (OS) for $5 :hat

[ducks]

five bucks for xp that is what it is worth NO MORE

[ChumpDumper]

Our company dallied with going full Linux including OpenOffice last year -- looking back, OO was the best thing about it. We put it on all the computers we sell these days. Again, not quite MS Office, but meets the needs of most of our customers. I need to d/l the new beta to check out the presentation application. It's pretty impressive what can be put on a computer for free: Open Office, AVG, various firewall programs....

[duncan_21]

You got ripped. You can find the student/teacher edition for $100. The only way that is a decent value is if you got Access out of it.

If you attend a college or university, you should with its computer science dept. to see if they have any agreements with MS.

At A&M we got Office XP Pro for $20, and XP Pro (OS) for $5 :hat

No it's the complete version. It has access and the outlook business manager too. I could have got the standard version (w/out access) for about that price.

I had to get it because it works well with microsoft's visual studio.NET 2003.

Plus I'm not a student so I couldn't shop around and got it off of ebay.

[baseline bum]

Just din't build it from source. That thing took forever to build on my linux box. Plus, I had to build java first, which also took a good amount of time.