Home office application alternatives to Microsoft products

Question: I want to do some home office applications such as spreadsheets and word processing, but the Microsoft products that come pre-installed on my computer are on a trial basis and are prohibitively expensive for what I need. Are there any alternatives to these?

Answer: There are a lot of home office software products available on the market for your use. However, most are in fact a bit on the expensive side as they are designed for actual business office use. One recent addition to the family of office software is Open Office. Open Office is what is known as open-source software which means that the source codes for programming is open to use and research by any software programmer. This also means no expensive licensing and copyright costs for the producer to defray in the end cost of the software. Currently Open Office comes bundled with a slideshow power point type application , a spreadsheet, word processor, art program, as well as a calculator and a few other applications and currently is available for free download at http://www.openoffice.org . It is compatible with most Microsoft Office extensions such as excel and word documents though there are occasional software translation errors with older versions of MS Office, Word, and Works so it is always wise to make backups of your original documents before converting them to Open Office if you should choose to use it.

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