Dump Microsoft Office For Free Alternative
March 29, 2007 – 5:35 am
I have written about free, open source software alternatives in past but I thought it might be time to bring up the topic again since Microsoft recently introduced Office 2007. Open source projects are cooperative efforts to develop a variety of software alternatives. The software is developed by highly qualified software engineers as a service to users and best of all the software is freely available for download.
NeoOffice, the free Java-based alternative to Microsoft Office for Mac has just been updated to version 2.1. The suite includes a word processor, spreadsheet and presentation application, which now supports Office 2007 Word documents and Excel macros.
The new edition is based on the OpenOffice.org 2.1 codebase and requires Mac OS X 10.3 or later It is available as two separate editions, for PowerPC and Intel processors. I have currently have the last version on my wife’s Intel Mac and it has functioned just fine, although she is not exactly a power user.
These open source office suites are a great free alternative to paying for Microsoft’s Office regardless of which operating system you are using. Windows users may want to check out Open Office 2.2 for a mature alternative. There are open source alternatives for almost any type of software you might need. Just do a Google search using terms like “open source spreadsheet software” or “open source office suite” to find the alternatives.