Living without Microsoft Office

Yes, There Can Be Life After Word

Excerpts:

The advantage to Google Docs is that you can work on a document at home on one computer, store it and then grab the same document on another computer, even at the office. You could work on the document with any computer that has an Internet connection. (There’s the hitch: you can’t work on it while on a plane.)

Actually, there is another hitch. You store the documents on Google servers. That might make someone dealing with important documents nervous, if you think Google might be looking at them or that someone might hack in.

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You can also get good free office applications that reside on your PC the old-fashioned way from Abiword.com or OpenOffice.org


Comment: I'm a little spoiled because I have all the tools provided by my employer. We can even buy Office at a substantial discount for personal use. I love computing "in the cloud" ... having everything on the Net instead of on my MacBook, or Dell, or Vista HP, or Lenovo Thinkpad. Work stuff ... is on a shared drive. Personal stuff is "in the cloud". I've used Open Office on a Linux workstation for work processing and for spreadsheets ... it does everything that I would do in Word of Excel. The Office product that I love is Access. I've used AbiWord as well. It is capable!