You've got to ask yourself how corporates make their IT purchasing decisions. In my previous employment, they used a very old version of Microsoft Office (97?) which had trouble reading some of the newer Word documents. You often had to go back to the person who sent the Word doc and ask them to re-send as a Word 97 compatible format, so it could be opened. Talk about making more work for yourself. You could request Microsoft Office 2003, but this was reserved to 'special' employees who put forward a case for requiring the new suite.

OpenOffice 3.1 is now available and this is a free cross-platform Office-compatible suite that ships with a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation tool and more. Better still, you can assign a multi-seat license and then enable your employees to use the software on their desktop or laptop, irrespective of operating system. It can read/write to just about every format, so few compatibility issues.

The latest OpenOffice 3.1 ships with a number of improvements, although most of them are relatively minor.

OpenOffice 3.1 link.

07 May 2009