Microsoft Office vs. OpenOffice.org Essay -- Computers Software Techno

Microsoft Office vs. OpenOffice.org According to Microsoft.com, a new version of Microsoft Office 2003 will normally cost anywhere between $400 - $500, depending on which version you get. While Microsoft also has a $150 â€Å"Student and Teacher Edition† which is the same at the $400 Standard Edition, most people do not qualify for that version, and even for those that do, $150 can still be a lot of money, especially for a student, and $400 is much more than most people would want to spend simply to type a document occasionally. These prices seem even more extreme in light of the fact that there are many free alternatives to Microsoft Office. One of the most popular and well known alternatives is OpenOffice.org, which is usually called just OpenOffice or OO. I am going to be discussing whether OO really is comparable to Microsoft Office for the average user. I'm am not going to try to show that OO is a better office suite than Office, because if you ignore the money issue, Office really is an ex cellent collection of programs that have set the standard for office suites in general. All I am going to be looking at is whether OO really has the most of the same capabilities as Office, and is comparable in it's ease of use as well. The word processor is probably the most important application to look at when comparing the two suites. Microsoft's word processor is called Word, and OO's is called Writer. These two programs are very similar in what they are able to do, and it's hard to tell much difference between the two at first glance. If a user is accustomed to Word, Writer has a very familiar look to it, and so a user new to Writer should have no problem jumping right into the program without havin... ...slide at all. That is not to say that Impress is incapable of creating custom animations, it is just that it has troubles displaying the animations from a PowerPoint file. Since the animations could be a big part of a presentation, trying to transfer PowerPoint files over to Impress files can be a lot of work. If the user does not have to transfer files, and can instead create them from scratch in Impress, there is little difference between the two programs capabilities. As we've seen, although there are some big differences between OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office, both offer the same basic functionality to casual users who might not use some of the more complex features. Coupled with the fact that OpenOffice.org is free, and Microsoft Office can cost anywhere from $150 - $500, it seems clear that OpenOffice.org is a good choice for most people.