Reality is that most web development agencies are not aware of the full power of web today, letalone clients themselves
The time of paying money for office software tools is over as far as Flexewebs are concerned. This article has been written in OpenOffice2.0, which is at least as functional as the latest version of Microsoft Office, but is totally free to use.
So far, most businesses thought of office software as an essential purchase in order to be able to exist and survive. The reality matched that perception. Microsoft Office still plays an important role in almost every business throughout the world. In reality small businesses found the expense of purchasing Microsoft Office products especially burdening, as the software does not necessarily provide any direct added value to the business, but is nevertheless highly required.
The fact that Microsoft Office was the only note-worthy software package on the market made the matters even more difficult. There was no real choice to be made. It was more like making a decision of which Office version to go for in order to pay less, knowing that there were no improvements made to Microsoft Office software for years, while the prices were maintained at very similar or even higher levels.
Enter OpenOffice1.0 with a new file format called ODF (Open Document Format). Amazingly the software is free, but more importantly can open Microsoft Office files and even more importantly can save material in Microsoft Office formats. It has Power Point, Excel and Word equivalents, all fully functional and all cross-compatible.
As soon as OpenOffice1.0 was released, we had a go at using it. We were very sceptical and thought that the software was a bit of an over-hyped and too simplistic open source project. The face that Sun Microsystems supported it made us think twice. We thought we would put the tool to the test and wrote a whole 100-page book using it. It never crashed. It also had a very sexy feature of exporting documents directly into PDF format, which made it a piece of cake to publish material on the web (something that Microsoft Office did not support due to the fact that PDF file format is owned by Adobe).
OpenOffice1.0 had all the necessary features in its 'Word' package that we needed for writing this long document, including the automatic book index tool, headings and all the necessary formatting tools. It supported tables and all the usual tools that one would need in order to make descent word presentations. Its 'Excel' package was not as smart as Microsoft's, but it was still capable of doing all the basic stuff that Microsoft's version did. We were not impressed by it as much and thought that OpenOffice could do with an upgrade.
To our very pleasant surprise, only few months down the line a new version of OpenOffice hit the web. OpenOffice2.0 was born and it featured improvements exactly as we envisaged them. The 'Excel' package was now much better and much more Microsoft like in behaviour, while the new version also featured a Base tool (equivalent to Microsoft Access), which was one of the missing links from the previous version.
All packages still worked very well, were very stable and did all we needed them to do. There was no going back to Microsoft this time round for us. We had a free, stable and fully functional version of Office on our Windows machines now, and we were happy. We also found out that OpenOffice2.0 was liked by other people.
So what is the really good thing about OpenOffice2.0? It is not the stability and functionality, but the fact that it uses ODF. ODF has recently been approved as an ISO standard, which means that ODF (from now on) will be considered by any organisation around the world as a fully-functional and genuine file format (just like .doc was for a long time).
ODF works on XML basis and is very good for the causes it is used for. The files in ODF are inter-operable between the packages in OpenOffice2.0 (which are: Draw, Calc, Impress, Write, Math and Base).
The real power of OpenOffice2.0 will mean that your business (and any other business for that matter) will be able to ditch the old and useless Microsoft Office in favour of newer, stable, sleek and powerful OpenOffice2.0. The whole system can be inter-operable with the existing .doc and other Microsoft Office formats and it will cost nothing to instal, ran and maintain. It is a truly important and historical moment in software development for everyone around the world.
