Multiple monitor support: Free Upgrade

Yet another fabulous presentation freebie...just in time for the holidays!

Open Office has announced a new version of its free office productivity suite. OpenOffice.org is recommending the 2.1 upgrade for all users, as it "represents a significant improvement over all previous versions."

But even if you are not an OpenOffice user, you can still download 2.1 for free. One of the highly touted new features for those who give presentations is multiple monitor support for Open Office Impress.

Of course, I suspect that OO announced this "major upgrade" in anticipation of the Microsoft Office "major upgrade" expected in January 2007! Beat 'em to the punch?

The idea: get folks to download the free Open Office Suite, so that when MS asks for hundreds of dollars in January, clients will say "what for?"

If you aren't aware of Open Office, here's the skinny:

Writer = Word Processing
Calc = Spreadsheet
Impress = Presentations

Each program in the OO Suite looks and feels much like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Except that Open Office is free. And each program can also save to .doc, .xls, or .ppt (and more.)

Another added bonus: with one click, you can save your OO files to a PDF document, as well.

In June of this year, I conducted an "Open Office" experiment. I left my Microsoft Suite (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.) off of my new laptop and attempted to go about my business. I found that I was just as productive with the free Open Office software as I was with the MS Suite...without the hefty price tag. I wrote documents in Writer, gave presentations in Impress, and calculated campaigns in the Calc spreadsheet.

And I found in my travels that many teachers, students, and small business folks have already started using the OO Suite.

What do you plan to do over the next few months? Stick with what you have, download OO, or upgrade to the new MS Suite? ¶ 12/15/2006 12:14:00 PM