With the launch of Microsoft’s new suite of software with an interface make-over comes an offer no money saving uni student could refuse. Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007, for $75. The website advertising it all – itsnotcheating.com.au – is clearly aimed at uni students who pirate their copies of Office. After all how many students can afford the pricey Office suite, even with a normal student discount? It sounds like a great deal – you can even get a year’s trial for only $25, however I propose a better one. How about free? And no it is not cheating.
OpenOffice has been around for quite a while, however it is only just starting to pick up momentum as it becomes discovered by more and more individuals, businesses, and NPOs. The great thing about OpenOffice is that it follows the open standard. Basically this means that it is designed in such a way that features can be continually added, and remain standard across all office software which use the OpenDocument format.
The OpenDocument format was created as an ‘open-source’ format with the purpose of unifying all of the different document types into one public standard. Remember how annoying it was not being able to open Office 2000 documents with Office 97? OpenOffice can open both of these formats, and many more, however you are encouraged to save documents in the OpenDocument format. So it would seem logical that Microsoft’s new Office would embrace this new ‘universal’ format to eliminate all of the compatibility problems. Instead, in the Microsoft tradition, the company has opted to create yet another proprietary format, the Office 2007 format. By default, files saved in Microsoft Office 2007 cannot be opened in Office 2003. So Microsoft released a patch. Another bandage to fix up another wound.
One more thing to note – Microsoft’s offer is only available to Australian university students, and expires 28 May 2007. OpenOffice is free for anyone, for any use, forever.
Office 2007 (Australia University Students only)
OpenOffice
