Open Office for free

This is the first of a series or articles featuring Free Open Source Software. This is business class software that is free. Grant High School gives copies of this software to all students when they enrol at the school so that students can continue with their learning at home without cost and without pirating.

Open Office is a great office package similar to Microsoft Office. It has a word processor, spreadsheet, database, presentation and graphics program built into it. It is able to use the normal Microsoft Office files. This means that it can load and save Word, Excel and PowerPoint files.

There is good documentation and a strong online user community that can support you with using this software.

The drawing package is particularly good for making diagrams. When you join two objects with a line you can move the objects around and the line stays connected.

You can find more about Open Office and even download it at the Open Office website http://www.openoffice.org/