5/31/2011

Using a Computer 1001: OpenOffice > MSO

MSO is French for "waste of money", and translates directly to "Microsoft Office". You get a free 60 day trial from your new computer? Congratulations. Use it for 60 days and then uninstall it. From now on, you'll be using the free and much better alternative: OpenOffice.


And yes, it IS one word. It can be downloaded from this site:

http://www.openoffice.org/




And while it is possible I post the direct download link, I prefer people to read what they're downloading from the site and not just from some two-bit moron on the Internet with a 36 hour old blog. Read about it, download it, install it. You should be able to do all of that without my visual aids. It's a rather large file, so be warned, it may take a while.

Alright, now we've got the hottest new office software out there for a free ∞ day trial. That's right folks; it's free, and no, this isn't a sponsorship. I wish people paid me to do this.

So run it up. You should get a window that looks like this if you just opened the OpenOffice.org application from your start bar or desktop


Now you just click whatever one you want and start doing what you want. As a note, you can also just pick "OpenOffice Writer", as an example, if you wanted to open up a word processor (the equivalent to Microsoft Word).

I strongly recommend following this next piece of advice. Whenever you are saving a document that you've just written, let's say a text file that you wrote in Writer, always save it as a 97/2000/XP doc, because that file is compatible with the current MSO, and most computers you'd want to open it on will open it. OpenOffice will by default save as an .odt, so make sure you "save as" and pick the right file format.


That's about as much help as I can give you with this. The same rule would apply for the Presentation software (equivalent to PowerPoint) and the Spreadsheet (Excel).



As for compatibility, OpenOffice will open any document you ask it to, and as long as you save it as the right file format, you should never have an issue.

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