The most obvious one first:

OpenOffice.org instead of Microsoft Office

OpenOffice.org (OOo) is not a clone of Microsoft Office (MSO). Things don’t work exactly the same, and no-one can guarantee 100% compatibility between the two programs, but for most users OOo will do everything they will ever want and more. It actually gives you more features than MSO Standard Edition 2003 does “out of the box”!

OOo can open, edit and save documents in Microsoft formats (.doc, .xls, .ppt) so you can open your existing files without having to do any conversion. You might want to though, because OpenDocument (OOo’s native format) is an Internationally recognized ISO standard, used by many different Office Suites. It means that, in the future, if you prefer to use a different Office Suite, there’s nothing to stop you, and compatibility should be 100%.

Microsoft’s document formats are proprietary (owned by MS) and closed source. That’s why sometimes it’s difficult for OOo to get the formatting exactly right, MS won’t tell anyone the way the documents are stored internally in the computer – OOo developers have to work it out for themselves. That being the case I think they’ve done an excellent job!

There are IME 2 groups of people who do seem to struggle a little with OOo:

1. Those who have learned to do things “a certain way” in MSO, and have difficulty learning a slightly different (usually more logical) way of doing things.
   e.g. MSO: File > Page Setup / OOo: Format > Page
2. MSO “Power Users” who use a very specific set of tools and are highly skilled with them. Often these users take some time getting used to a different way of doing things and often get frustrated that they are having to re-learn things. For a small number of these people OOo lacks a specific feature they need.

If you’re not in one of those groups, then you should find the transition to OOo easy. Even if you are, within a short time you will be just as productive using OOo, and better off 😉

One of the great things about Open Source Software and the OOo project is that you, an end user, can request an enhancement, vote for it, even campaign to get it integrated and (admittedly often slower than we’d like) often it does get included. I have personally seen a number of enhancements and fixes worked on and included in the suite.

If you are using Microsoft Works, stop! There is absolutely no reason to do so anymore, use OOo instead.

You can download OOo for free, or if you prefer to have it on a CD visit www.8daysaweek.co.uk and order a CD from there for your Operating System (about £10 delivered). The 8daysaweek CD also includes approx 50 other high-quality Open Source programs, so it’s a great introduction to Open Source if you’re not sure what to make of all this!