"Substitute?" "Replacement?" We believe it to be so, but we know, deep down, that it cannot be; if it were, in the sense that proprietary Microsoft code were used in order to clone aspects and functions of MS Office, Microsoft would just sue Sun or anyone else involved in OO (by dint of great effort, however, the OO crew has managed to successfully read/write files saved in Word, Excel, and Powerpoint formats).

 

And yet, we ignore the naysayers, who say nay to free open source office suites, because, they claim, such suites are just a pale imitation of the "real thing." But we aren't purists; we frankly don't care what the label on the box says. To us, the slight incompatibilities that crop up between OO and MS Office files occasionally are besides the point (http://tinyurl.com/2qna8b). What, then, is the point? The $400 plus or so you save when you don't buy the MS product, and instead download the OO product for your office suite needs.

 

 

 

What remains, then, is to do what we can to make OO as good as it can be – as fast, compatible, and user-friendly as possible. Nobody said OO was perfect; it can be slow, as those who use it regularly have noticed. Documentation can be spotty, if not downright esoteric; it's a common with with open source software, And then there's that compatibility thing; you really want to do whatever possible to minimize the possibility that those you send your files to will have problems. But where there's a will, there's a way – and the will to save money is such that people like me have searched high and low for solutions to these dilemmas. Fortunately, there are ways around all these issues; OpenOffice.org may come at a cut-rate price, but it can hold its own against the competition, if not beat it in several important ways.