at my previous employer purchased only came with a 60-day trial of Microsoft Office. I started to investigate some alternatives and found OpenOffice. OpenOffice is a complete office suite that offers virutally the same feature sets as the Microsoft Suite. It is an Open Source project and is pretty mSomebody called me crazy the other day for not having Microsoft Office, specifically, Microsoft Word, on my PC. Maybe I am. Or maybe not! On one hand, it seems as if almost every small business process today involves the Microsoft Office Suite (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc). On the other hand, I have done just fine for the past three years without using Microsoft Word.

Now, I am not some kind of anti-Microsoft freak. I just try to be as practical and open-minded as possible.

Bottom line for me — I only need about 5% of the features that Microsoft Word offers to run my business. The other 95% just makes the program bloated, confusing, and slow. Oh yeah, and expensive. When you run a small business, you count every penny.

I know shelling out $200 - $400 is not going to kill my business. But For me, I just can’t justify it, when there are other products out there that have the features I need — for free. Below are three alternatives that I currently use.

• OpenOffice Suite (http://www.openoffice.org) I started using OpenOffice about three years ago when the laptop that my previous employer purchased only came with a 60-day trial of Microsoft Office. I started to investigate some alternatives and found OpenOffice. OpenOffice is a complete office suite that offers virutally the same feature sets as the Microsoft Suite. It is an Open Source project and is pretty mu
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  Many online users are confused between Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM).SEO is a way of optimizing your website through the use of meta tags, title tag and contents of the website to get good listing on organic search engine results, in major search engines like Google, Yahoo!, or MSN.Search engine uses a system known as ‘spider’ to crawl out data from the website to determine how relevant the website content is to the keyword search. There are
  e done just fine for the past three years without using Microsoft Word.

  Now, I am not some kind of anti-Microsoft freak. I just try to be as practical and open-minded as possible.

  Bottom line for me — I only need about 5% of the features that Microsoft Word offers to run my business. The other 95% just makes the program bloated, confusing, and slow. Oh yeah, and expensive. When you run a small business, you count every penny.

  I know shelling out $200 - $400 is not going to kill my business. But For me, I just can’t justify it, when there are other products out there that have the features I need — for free. Below are three alternatives that I currently use.

  • OpenOffice Suite (http://www.openoffice.org) I started using OpenOffice about three years ago when the laptop that my previous employer purchased only came with a 60-day trial of Microsoft Office. I started to investigate some alternatives and found OpenOffice. OpenOffice is a complete office suite that offers virutally the same feature sets as the Microsoft Suite. It is an Open Source project and is pretty m
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    my business. The other 95% just makes the program bloated, confusing, and slow. Oh yeah, and expensive. When you run a small business, you count every penny.

    I know shelling out $200 - $400 is not going to kill my business. But For me, I just can’t justify it, when there are other products out there that have the features I need — for free. Below are three alternatives that I currently use.

    • OpenOffice Suite (http://www.openoffice.org) I started using OpenOffice about three years ago when the laptop that my previous employer purchased only came with a 60-day trial of Microsoft Office. I started to investigate some alternatives and found OpenOffice. OpenOffice is a complete office suite that offers virutally the same feature sets as the Microsoft Suite. It is an Open Source project and is pretty m
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      there that have the features I need — for free. Below are three alternatives that I currently use.
      • OpenOffice Suite (http://www.openoffice.org) I started using OpenOffice about three years ago when the laptop that my previous employer purchased only came with a 60-day trial of Microsoft Office. I started to investigate some alternatives and found OpenOffice. OpenOffice is a complete office suite that offers virutally the same feature sets as the Microsoft Suite. It is an Open Source project and is pretty m
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        at my previous employer purchased only came with a 60-day trial of Microsoft Office. I started to investigate some alternatives and found OpenOffice. OpenOffice is a complete office suite that offers virutally the same feature sets as the Microsoft Suite. It is an Open Source project and is pretty much compatible with MS Office.I use it daily to open up client documents (Word and Excel). I can even create new documents and save them in the Word “doc” format. If you are looking for lots of features, OpenOffice is a great product. However, it’s drawback is just that — in it’s attempt to match MS Office feature-for-feature, it is starting to become somewhat bloated and bulky as well.

      • AbiWord (http://www.abisource.com). If you are looking for a fast, simple (and free!) Word Processor with all of the important features that you use daily, then this AbiWord is a great little package for you! I stumbled across it when I was getting a little too impatient with OpenOffice. AbiWord is fast-loading and very easy to use. Let’s face it, most of what we want to do with a word processor is to quickly create simple documents that have some basic formatting, and move on with our day. AbiWord is perfect for that. There are no frills here — it is a stand-alone Word Processor. However, it does have do Templates and Mail-Merge — two of those advance features that I do require. The only drawback I’ve found is whe