After looking for a couple of good office suits, I finally came to the conclusion that I’m possibly not the right person to comment on this.
I have used only two different office productivity suits in my life and would have to recommend the free one seeing that this articles deals with free software.
I have a lot of clients using Open Office.Org mainly because it’s totally compatible with commercial office software such as Microsoft Office which is probably the most widely used office suit around. Open Office.Org has all the functionality that you get from commercial packages. You have a great word processor called Write, if you are familiar with MS Office you’d be able to make the transformation to Open Office.Org with no issues. There is also a spreadsheet application called Calc which does what you’d expect from a spreadsheet application and possibly more. Then there is Impress which you can use to make amazing presentations. There is an application for accessing databases called Base, I haven’t used it yet, but I’ve spoken to my clients and they are very happy with it. Draw is another application in the Open Office.Org suite that I have not yet used. As far as I can see it’s used for all sorts of graphics from simple sketches to flowcharts and this in either 2D or 3D.
Read up more on all the great features of Open Office.Org and why you should choose this excellent office suite http://why.openoffice.org/why_great.html
I feel this package is great because, it offers a very nice set of tools needed by most companies and home users alike. The nice part of Open Office.Org is that it is all packed in one application which can do everything from one screen. You can even save your work in other formats such as PDF and HTML. Like all good software, Open Office.Org is updated regularly and can be downloaded absolutely free.
With all the office documentation needs out of the way, I feel this leaves only one more application the office or home user will need. This is a good email program. For this I can recommend Mozilla Thunderbird mainly because like Open Office.Org, I use it myself and know that it’s good.
Mozilla Thunderbird has loads of themes and add ons which can be downloaded from the Mozilla website to make the program do basically whatever it is you want it to do. You can download dictionaries in lots of different languages from Afrikaans to Zulu. Updates are downloaded regularly to ensure your software is always up to date and as secure as possible.
If I have left out something that would make this article more complete, please don’t hesitate to send me a mail telling me what type of free software would complete this article. I could possibly at a later stage do a third part with all the other software in.
Till next time, happy computing.
