Free Software for Your Home Business: Open Office

If you have a home office and always wanted to own popular software like Microsoft Office Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio or Access, but couldn’t afford the high price tag, you should explore a free download of the Open Office Software Suite on Cnet.com - see our references section at the end for a download link.

Most home businesses run on a tight budget, so it’s important to take advantage of all the free tools available. This free home business software bundle has all the basic features of Microsoft Office and other popular retail software, and it readily integrates with most Microsoft Office prepared documents.

The word processor in the Open Office software suite is called Writer. This software gives you the ability to create multi-functional text documents compatible with Microsoft Word and Word Perfect documents.

Writer includes formatting, spell check, image importing, tabular edits and the ability to make an interactive table of contents. This free home business software also converts easily into PDF formats to share documents with people who don’t have a word processor available to them.

Calc is Open Office’s answer to Microsoft Excel. Users can create simple to complex spreadsheets with functions and formulas. Sort, subtotal, import and export – all the features you need are in this package.

Create electronic presentation materials with Impress. This package allows you to make professional and colorful documents – including importing images from other software packages like Microsoft Power Point. You can even work with HTML, XML or PDF format documents.

Draw is the Open Office software for creating graphics and electronic diagrams. Make organization charts, process flow diagrams or any graphic you need for your home business without incurring the expense of a program like Microsoft Visio or CorelDraw.

Math is another offering in the Open Office suite that allows users to develop mathematical formulas and equations. The equations can be used in Open Office software or Microsoft Office programs.

The last piece of software in this suite is Base. This open platform software rivals Microsoft Access and allows you to build and maintain dynamic databases for reporting and storing important information.

An added benefit to using Open Office software is the community of online programmers and businesses willing to share their templates and extensions with you for free. Quick web searches will yield resumes, invoices, report formats and additional graphics to share.

The list of features in this office productivity suite seems endless.

Open Office is just one of the many free home business software packages offered on the Internet. Each of the programs are free and yours for the taking. Join the many businesses – big and small – that benefit from open platform software. Open Office is the Microsoft office alternative that will boost your home office productivity with first class a first-class word processor, spreadsheets and more. And best of all, it's free – it doesn’t get any better than that.

Open Office Download from Cnet.com,

Microsoft Office, http://www.microsoftstore.com

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