Open Office Notes
A very good office suite package made open source by Sun. I've had good success with "average" Word and Excel files. The average home user can probably switch with no problems.
A few notes:
Multiuser Windows machines (i.e. pretty much all newer setups!)
- The mindset is different from Windows only apps. You must install a shared installation first with "setup /net" - use a command box. Then for each user who wishes to use the program, run setup.exe that is in the folder installed OOo to.
This is a somewhat popular alternate distrubion of OpenOffice.org, it includes MS Works importer, WordPerfect graphics import, and a linear solver for calc.
http://go-oo.org/discover/
The "official" OOo site is: http://openoffice.org
Sun has their commercialized version called Star Office, but Google gives it away for free with the "Google Pack". Go figure.
tags: ooo, openoffice,