The Cutting Edge of Online Marketing

Tired of paying exorbitant licensing fees every time you install or upgrade bloated, unstable software? Here are a couple of Office alternatives that won’t cost you a dime.

The best known of these is OpenOffice.org. OpenOffice.org (OOo) began as StarOffice, developed by Star Division and acquired by Sun Microsystems in 1999.

The OpenOffice.org suite is composed of Writer, a word processor similar to Microsoft Word or Word Perfect; Calc, a spreadsheet similar to Microsoft Excel or Lotus 1-2-3; Impress, a presentation program similar to Microsoft PowerPoint and Apple Keynote; Base, a database management similar to Microsoft Access; Draw, a vector graphics editor similar to early versions of Corel Draw and Microsoft Visio; and Math, a tool for creating and editing mathematical formulae.

OpenOffice.org can read and write all popular file formats, including .doc, .xls, .ppt, etc. It can also read and save .docx, .xlsx, .rtf, .txt, .csv and more so you don;t need to concern yourself with file compatibility.

OpenOffice.org Start Screen

A feature of OpenOffice.org that I really like in the “one click” creation of PDFs from Writer and Calc. Another is the ability of Impress to export to .swf so that a presentation can be viewed on any computer with a Flash player installed.

OpenOffice.org is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. There is also a Mac-only fork called NeoOffice which contains most of the features of OpenOffice.org.

Don’t think that OpenOffice.org is a “cult” application only used by the anti-Microsoft crowd. Wikipedia says, “OpenOffice.org and StarOffice had secured 15-20% of the business market as of 2004. The OpenOffice.org web site reported more than 98 million downloads as of September 2007. OpenOffice.org 3.x reached one hundred million downloads, just over a year since its release.”

OpenOffice.org is released under an open-source licence (the LGPL), which means it may be used free of any licence fees, for any purpose: private, governmental, commercial, etc. Once acquired (either as a free download or as a CD) it may be installed on an unlimited number of computers, and may be copied and distributed without restriction. OpenOffice.org supports extensions, allowing users to add on extra functions easily from an extensions repository. This is a key differentiator from the competition.

Again quoting Wikipedia, “studies have shown that OpenOffice has reached a point where it has an “irreversible” installed user base and that it will continue to grow.”

Quoting Wikipedia one more time, “The source code of the suite was released in July 2000 with the aim of reducing the dominant market share of Microsoft Office by providing a free and open alternative; later versions of StarOffice are based upon OpenOffice.org with additional proprietary components. The OpenOffice.org project is primarily sponsored by Oracle Corporation (having acquired Sun Microsystems). Other major corporate contributors include Novell, Red Hat, IBM, Google and others.”

If you’re just looking for a simple, but very powerful word processor that is Open Source (free) and will run on Windows, Mac or various Linux flavors, AbiWord may be just the ticket.

AbiWord is a free word processing program similar to Microsoft® Word. It is suitable for a wide variety of word processing tasks.

AbiWord allows you to collaborate with multiple people on one document at the same time. It is tightly integrated with the AbiCollab.net web service, which lets you store documents online, allows easy document sharing with your friends, and performs format conversions on the fly.

What use is a Word Processor when you can’t share your documents with your friends? AbiWord is able to read and write all industry standard document types, such as OpenOffice.org documents, Microsoft Word documents, WordPerfect documents, Rich Text Format documents, HTML web pages and many more.

Choose one of these Open Source solutions that meets your needs and you’ll be humming along free from those expensive proprietary licenses.

I love it when simple products do a job extraordinarily well. In a recent blog post, Refreshing Your Manufactured Housing website – why?, we covered some of the reasons why now may be the time to update your online information. If you haven’t read it, of have forgotten it, read it again.

In the July issue of MHMSM.com, Maria Cucchiara of All Seasons Communications wrote Six Reasons to Update Your Current MH Website, which explained why an updated website is a necessity. Again, read it or re-read it – there is wisdom in Maria’s words.

All well and good. All commercial websites need to be refreshed every few years or their effectiveness starts to fade. And that is a job for a web design professional. If that’s where you find yourself, call us.

But what about those little changes that need to be made from time to time? You know the ones… a changed price or phone number. Adding a feature to a bullet list. Adding or deleting a dated sentence…

If your’s is a small to medium operation, you may not want to call your web developer every time one of those pops up. If you hired an amateur – or a part-time developer – you may have to wait a long time to get the change made – if ever. They may have simply disappeared or gone out of business.

What if there was a way to make it easy for anyone in your office who can create a simple Word doc to make those little updates for you? Think that could save you some time and money? You bet it could!

If we had built your website, you probably wouldn’t be facing this problem right now because it would be built on a platform that allows you to make simple updates.

But even if your website was built using static pages, the ability to edit sections of your site can be added even now.

And if you can use Microsoft Word®, you can use the simple WYSIWYG interface that can be installed on your website using the files you use now, and keeping the “look and feel” of your current site – the design.

There is more information on this on the Update Your Own Website page at OrangeCat.net. If you are in the position where you or an employee need to make some updates to your website, this may be the answer.

And we’ve been doing this since 1996, so we’ve never vanished on any client.