Oxygen Office Suite

One of my clients has been recording financial transactions on the Microsoft Works spreadsheet that comes bundled in with new PCs. However, from the perspective of an Accountancy professional, the Works’ spreadsheet is a waste of both the Hard Disk space it occupies and the RAM required to run it. You could fall into the trap of upgrading to the powerful but expensive Microsoft Office suite or you could consider the leading Open Source equivalent.

Formally known as Open Office Professional, Oxygen Office is a powerful office suite along the same lines as Microsoft Office. The best thing about it? IT’S FREE.
I’ve been using this software for about a year and I find I’m using it more than my outdated version of Microsoft Office. I could rant and rave about this software but the Open Office site does a much better job of it.
Unlike the Microsoft product, you can download as many copies as you wish and incur no additional license fees.
What’s more you can burn as many copies of the program (or source) to CD or DVD for distribution to your colleagues as you want – you can even sell it for a profit without paying royalties.
Unlike its Microsoft equivalent, Oxygen Office allows the user to open, edit and save documents created by a variety of Office suites (including Microsoft Office!), which means that you can still share documents with people still locked into Microsoft products.
Still not convinced? In the UK, the Open Office suite is currently used by the British Army and Bristol City Council and, from 2008, Birmingham City Council. Across Europe, Open Office is the office suite of choice of the French Parliament and civil service and most city councils in Germany.

FREE PDF Converter

I came across this free PDF converter just this weekend. Simply download the software, together with the converter (Ghostscript) and you can easily change your Microsoft documents to PDF format via the File>Print command!

Open Source Software

Over the last year or so I’ve been trying out Open Source Software. Basically, Open Source Software is distributed under a license which makes freely available the code (programming) so that others may contribute to, further develop and improve its functionality.

There are bonuses for us non-geeks, too. Open source material is quite often free or available very cheaply and quite often the multi-user license deals are extremely generous. Probably the best known example here is the GNU General Public License (GPL).

Another highly desirable feature of Open Source is the way in which security is built into the source as the program as its developed, rather than as an afterthought as is often the case with proprietary products.

So what’s the catch? Well, certainly Open Source material is often less-polished than it’s proprietary equivalents and its development is dependant upon the likes of us to report bugs to the developers involved.

However, Open Source Software has moved on considerably and just about everyone with an internet connection will have come across it in some guise or another. The Mozilla Firefox browser, Apache Server Software, MySQL database, and php are just a few examples of Open Source applications.