Open Office Freebies

When your computer doesn’t come with some basic options like a word processing, spreadsheet, or presentation program, Open Office can save the day!

Open Office offers several great open platform programs that are operable on just about any system or in any language. For a free download, go to www.openoffice.org. The most common programs are Writer (a word processor similar to Microsoft Word), Calc (a spreadsheet similar to Microsoft Excel), Impress (a presentation program similar to Microsoft PowerPoint), and Draw (a vector graphics editor similar to Corel Draw). They have a few other programs there as well than can be used for more advanced office applications. These programs also allow you to export your creations as PDFs, which is a very convenient feature!

For tutorials on how to work Open Office programs and for some free templates, visit the following sites:

• http://www.kaaredyret.dk/openoffice_links.html
• http://documentation.openoffice.org/Samples_Templates/User/template/index.html
• http://openoffice.blogs.com/openoffice/templates/index.html
• http://www.smalldataproblem.org/ooextras

For more information on the history of Open Office and additional links, feel free to visit our friend Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenOffice.org.