Open Office REALLY is Better
A few months ago, I wrote an article on OpenOffice, a free office suite comparable to Microsoft's Office software. It contains programs such as a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation maker, etc...
This week I found myself implementing a spreadsheet for a somewhat complicated electrical engineering problem. It involved writing some computer program code in a language called BASIC, which essentially allows a user to create their own functions. Since the company where I work uses MS Office, I wrote my initial draft of the spreadsheet in Excel.
After a few hours of work, I came across something strange. My new functions were appearing to work correctly, but my final numbers were way off. After hours of debugging with another co-worker, we finally found out that MS Office was not allowing me to use the number pi, even though using pi works just fine when you type it straight into the Excel sheet. Ugh...
Later that week, I decided to re-create the spreadsheet in OpenOffice's Calc (the equivalent of Excel). To my surprise, many of the functions that I had to create myself were already included in OpenOffice! I tried using Pi, and it worked perfectly.
Now, anyone who tells you that OpenOffice is inferior to Microsoft's Office is badly mistaken. I know this from experience in dealing with both of them at a very deep level. If you are still paying hundreds of dollars for MS Office, you're wasting your money. Get OpenOffice for free, tell your friends to get OpenOffice for free, save hundreds of dollars, and support the open standards that OpenOffice provides.
