Free Office Program

Microsoft office is very expensive and for the average home user, in my opinion just not needed.  The average home user just wants the ability to create and open the odd word document, maybe create the occasional spreadsheet or power point presentation but I would guess that would be very rare.

When I rebuild machines often people don’t have their office CD as it was installed by a friend or they have lost it.  Rather than buy it I just install a free office program for them called Open Office and say see how you get on.  I have never had anyone come back and say they want to buy a Microsoft Office License.  Open office is free to download and use and can be downloaded from here http://www.openoffice.org/

The only thing you need to watch out for when using the open office software is that when you save a new document it will save it as an oft file which is their default file version which can’t be open by the Microsoft Office application if you were to email it to someone.  The way around this is to save the file in word format.  Either .doc for documents or .xls for spreadsheets.  You can either do this when you change the file or change it in the options to always use that as the default.  I will post a video on here shortly showing how to do this so please keep checking back if you need more detail on how to do this.