Hey, this is Will from BeYourOwnIT.com. And I’m going to give you a little tour through Open Office, which is an open source office suite that is compatible, mostly, with Microsoft Office. It’s going to be able to open most of the files, save files that do the types that Open Office is going to need. And best of all, it’s free. If you’re the kind of person who has multiple machines, you don’t want to spend the money on another copy of Microsoft Office for yet another machine in your stable of computers. Or if you have a laptop from school and it doesn’t have Office on it and you need Office for the school work you’re doing. And you don’t feel like purchasing another copy, Open Office may be able to get you by. This itself is Open Office.

When Open Office loads up, it’s got the Open Office desktop, and it has got a multiple selection screen. One is “Open a document” and there’s also a text document, which is the equivalent of Microsoft Word. Let’s say you make a file and you want to be open‑able by Microsoft Office.

If you actually go in here, it’s standardized to save it as an .odt, which Microsoft Office, the newer version, is going to open. But if you want to make sure that the older versions of Office and current version’s going to open it, you can save it as a Microsoft Word, XP, .doc file, and all of them will be able to open that, and so will you. So, I mean, that’s probably the safest bet.

Other options in Open Office are the Spreadsheet, which is going to be like Excel. Same difference, or same scenario, I should say. It’s going to ask you to save and it’s going to say, “Open Excel sheet” or “Open document format” and you can save it as a Microsoft Excel ‑ XP or Excel ’97 file and all the newer versions will be able to open it.

Presentation is Power Point, Drawing is Publisher, I do believe. Yes, Microsoft Publisher. The other two are Database, which would be like Access, and Formula, which is kind of its own little thing. Microsoft Office does not does not currently have a program like this in there. Mainly, it’s, type in math formulas, get answers. Could be useful for taking notes, could be useful for checking other answers, that sort of thing.

There’s also templates, which, different templates, you can create templates for different projects. It’s really a full featured office suite. And it works on Windows, works on Linux, works on Mac. It’s very widespread in what it can do and who it can help.

So, if you need an office solution and you’re not looking forward to shelling out for another copy of Microsoft Office, openoffice.org could be the product for you.

So, thanks, this has been Will for BeYourOwnIT.com.

OpenOffice is a great free program that you can download online and is a great alternative for those that do not want to purchase a Microsoft Office Suite. It is also mostly compatible with Microsoft Office.

To download this program, visit OpenOffice website and follow the directions to correctly install onto your computer.
Once you have installed OpenOffice and open it up, you will see many options very similar to Microsoft Office. Text Document is similar to Word, Spreadsheet is similar to Excel, Presentation is similar to PowerPoint, Drawing is similar to Publisher, Database is similar to Access, but OpenOffice does also include a program called Formula which can be very useful and is not included in Microsoft Office.

Now be sure to remember that OpenOffice will do just about all the basic things that Microsoft Office will, but does not hold all the features. The nice thing is it allows you to easily go back and forth from both by saving files in the same format.

If you want to make sure that the older versions of Microsoft Office will open your document, save your document in the .doc format instead of the new .odt format.