Open Revelation

I'm not sure if anyone is aware of this, but Microsoft Office is a joke.

You should never, under any circumstance (aside from being employed by Microsoft) purchase Microsoft Office.

Microsoft Office costs $150 bucks at Best Buy.

Open Office isn't sold by Best Buy. Why?

Because it's free.

"Sure," you're probably saying, "But it probably sucks. You get what you pay for, right?"

Not really. I've heard about Open Office for awhile, but I figured, why bother?

I'm not sure I have an answer for that. If your company is buying Microsoft office for you anyway, there's probably no reason to go download Open Office.

If you're thinking about getting a setup at home, you can't go wrong with Open Office. As far as I can tell, every document, spreadsheet, and presentation that you create with Microsoft Office can be opened with Open Office. A few embedded figures in one of my presentations was a little different looking (the background changed), but every document and spreadsheet seems to work perfectly in both programs.

I'll be honest, I don't really understand how the whole 'open source' stuff gets put together. However, I'm starting to like the products a lot. FireFox, Foxit, and now Open Office are all high-quality products that do everything their more costly (or more buggy) industry-made counterparts can do, only more, and free.

I'm looking to buy a new computer in the near future. I'm hearing a constant barrage of horrible things about Microsoft Vista. I'm probably going to end up buying a system from a company like this and run my machine with Ubuntu.

Anyone have any ideas about this? I mean, I really don't know much about computers, I'm just increasingly astonished at the quality of these open source products.