Catanoso Computing's Blog » open office http://www.catanosocomputing.com/blog Computer Repair: Tips, Tricks, News, and Much More! Thu, 31 Dec 2009 08:44:45 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.5 en hourly 1 Free Software http://www.catanosocomputing.com/blog/2009/03/free-software/ http://www.catanosocomputing.com/blog/2009/03/free-software/#comments Fri, 20 Mar 2009 11:44:23 +0000 admin http://www.catanosocomputing.com/blog/?p=31 Before you go out and spend hundreds and thousands of dollars on overpriced software from companies like Microsoft and Adobe, take the time to research open source software or other free software. Believe it or not, these types of software are highly reliable and completely compatible with the software giants applications. Let’s take Microsoft Office for example. This could run you a couple hundred dollars for the home user and three hundred dollars or more for businesses. Open Office, which you can download here, is an excellent alternative. It’s open source software in which programmers from all over the world help develop. They have a whole suite of programs including word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, and databases. All of these are also compatible with Microsoft Office meaning that if you work on something from home on Open Office, you can then bring it into work and load it into Microsoft Office without a problem.

Google is another major player with free applications. They have Google Apps, which includes just about everything. See the complete list here. The best part about Google Apps is that it is completely web based. This means you run the software from there servers instead of having to install it on your computer. All you need to do is setup an account with them which usually takes less than 5 minutes. Once your account is created, you will have complete access to all of their apps.

Free software is going to continually get better and better which is great for people looking for an alternative. Below you can see a few of my favorites:

Picasa 3: This is a photo editing program from Google which enables you to do a world of things with your photos. It can be downloaded here.

Open Office: As mentioned in my post this is a suite of programs including word processing, spreadsheets, databases, presentation, and graphics. It can be downloaded here.

CDBurnerXP: This is a CD/DVD burning program which gives you the majority of functions as a program like Nero would. It can be downloaded here.

Google Apps: See the complete list here.

Nicholas Catanoso
Catanoso Computing
http://www.catanosocomputing.com

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