Several months ago I decided to ditch Microsoft Office in favour of the Open Source alternative called OpenOffice.org. I figured that I bitched so much about MS that it was hypocritical of me to use its products when there was a perfectly good, and free, option available.

I've been using OpenOffice.org for several months and I can't say I've ever been sorry I made the switch. OpenOffice contains an excellent word processing program called Writer, a spreadsheet program called Calc, a html editor called Web, an equations program called Math, a presentation program called Impress, and a drawing program called Draw.

As a user of Microsoft's products for a long time I did find some of the differences between Office and OpenOffice somewhat frustrating. However, enter the excellent OpenOffice.org 1.0 Resource Kit written by Solveig Haughland and Floyd Jones to the rescue. I had already downloaded OpenOffice from the Internet so I didn't need the handy CD that comes with the weighty textbook that contains the OpenOffice program itself.

The book is accessible, simply-written, and enthusiastic about using the OpenOffice suite of programs. If you were a user of StarOffice (OpenOffice's earlier incarnation), there is information on how to upgrade to the more recent version. As you can imagine I haven't read the book from cover to cover (it's 1020 pages long), but it sits on my desk permanently, and it's my first port of call whenever I encounter something I want to do which I haven't tried before in OpenOffice. Thus far I've never been thwarted in my desire to customise my toolbars, spellcheckers or macros, since like most people, I like to have everything set up in a certain way. I've never had a compatibility problem either, and OpenOffice can open up MS documents, and I can save my OpenOffice documents in an MS format if necessary. I'm particularly fond of the fact that OpenOffice saves all its files in a very compact xml format. This means that files are much smaller in size. Not that it's such a problem since hard drives are so large these days, but it's the principle of avoiding bloatage that is admirable.

I recently had to try out Calc for the first time, and it opened up my MS spreadsheets with no difficulty. The ever dependable OpenOffice.org 1.0 Resource Kit was ready with simple and clear answers whenever I needed some issue sorted out. I would recommend for a OpenOffice newbie that buying a reference book liked the Resource Kit is advisable, as it will smooth your transition from MS dependence. If you consider that it's the only outlay that's necessary to use this excellent suite of programs then it's extremely cost effective and well worth the cash. And of course the best thing about OpenOffice is that when version 1.1 comes out you can just download the upgrade for no extra cost.

I'm never going back to the Office.