Need an office suite?

In today's day and age, almost everyone needs some office programs. Whether it is for writing a letter to a relative, making presentations for club meetings, or tracking the wins and losses of your favorite sports team, office suites are extremely useful.

Office suites are a collection of separate programs that are bundled together for the user's convenience. They almost always have a word processing program, a spreadsheet program, and a presentations program. Other programs that may be added include a database program, graphics program, email program, personal information manager (PIM), destktop publishing program, and possibly others, usually for extra costs.

If you need an office suite, you may want to take a look at OpenOffice.org 2.4, which was just released today. OpenOffice.org (or "OOo" for short), has a word processor (Writer), spreadsheet (Calc), presentations (Impress), graphics design (Draw), and database (Base).

And unlike many office suites, OOo is free. Not just free for home use, but free for any use... business, personal, educational, etc. It also runs on Windows, Linux, Mac OSX, and others.

It is a fairly hefty download, however. Expect to download at least 100 MB, depending on which system you are downloading the program for. Despite what the name suggests, it is not an online office suite. the ".org" was added on due to an existing trademark on the name "OpenOffice".

I've already noticed several little improvements between versions 2.3 and 2.4, and I look forward to working with the set of programs in the future.

I should clarify one thing, however. As I said, most office suites are a collection of separate programs bundled together. That isn't the case with OpenOffice.org. Instead, OOo was written essentially as one big program, with the individual features treated more as sub-programs. While that has the disadvantage of not being able to download, say, just the word processor, it has the advantage of having settings made in one sub-program effect all the rest of the programs, and learning how to use any one of the "sub-programs" gives a person a pretty good idea how to use the other sub-programs.

Anyway, give OpenOffice.org a try. You have nothing to lose except a download.