December 1, 2009

Some ways to get around the high price for Office

One of the biggest impediments to folks buying Microsoft Office is the price. Let’s be frank… it’s expensive. It’s hard for most folks to hand over hundreds of dollars just so that they can write documents and send e-mail. Here’s a resource I ran into that another MVP created. It has some good suggestions on how to get office or some Office functionality at lower cost (or free).

http://www.agentjim.com/MVP/PowerPoint/PowerPointForFree.html

I’ve suggested to many folks that Open Office (from Sun) is a decent (and free) alternative. It can read and save MS Office files. You can even set the defaults to that option.

I have no direct experience with OxygenOffice, but I’ve used several programs from SourceForge (free) and they all have been excellent programs…

IMNSHO (In My Not So Humble Opinion), though, I’d be very wary of installing betas, as Jim suggests. They usually expire and you almost never can upgrade a beta to the released product. You usually must uninstall the beta first. Also, betas can (and certainly have) cause problems, even crashing systems. General rule of thumb is to never install betas on a production/critical machine unless you are very capable of reacting to problems (and have very good backups (you DO have good backups, don’t you?)……

Good luck.

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