ADN

There is a tight and OPEN SOURCE Office application, easily comparible to MS Office and COMPLETELY COMPATIBLE WITH ALL OFFICE APPLICATIONS, and as customizable as Firefox.

This means you can make a word doc in open office, and send it to a guy running linux, a guy with a mac, and three people with three different makes of Windows, and they can all open the same file. The office applications compress more, as well.

and it weghs in just over 250 megs on a windows box.

You can find it at opensource.org, and I reccomend you do, if you are like me and use EVERY application in office.

Also, their power point application lets you make Flash Swf files, and their word makes a .pdf.

SWEET! (is an Excel geek)

Sounds sweet..! I want to try it...Got a name..?

Does it have something comparable to MS Access as well?

oh, did in mention this is built and supported by Sun microsystems...

now, i know you want it!

here are the programs and their (some inferior) MS office equivalents:

writer - word
impress - power point
math - no eqivalent (mathematical function calculator)
draw - no eqivalent (vector based drawing tool, power point XTREME)
Calc - excel
Base - access

check it out of openoffice.org

Ch

I am about to make a linux labtop, just cause, and i will really give this the complete workhorse test... but it has advantags that can't be beat.

Ch

Ah, OK..I know which one you speak of now...I'm gonna give it a go, should work well on my machine...

http://www.openoffice.org/

I tried open office about a year ago and I understand it has had several improvements since then. It is just as capable as word or excel (which I normally use). The looks need some work, but it is also very user friendly. If you have a small business or something like that it is fantastic /smile.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":)" border="0" alt="smile.gif" />

As office xp starts to get old chances are I'll stick to openoffice instead of buying a new office version.

Yo..!

I opened it, and it looked almost identical to my Microsoft 2003..! I can't wait to delve into its open source powers..

bd,

it is revolutionary in terms of where it use to be.

it looked pretty blech before,

it worked well, just looked cheap.

not anymore

we installed the staroffice (its previous name) a long time ago and worked pretty good, openoffice is not bad but not that good, anyway MS office is more crappy every new version they release.