Posted on Friday, October 28th (7531 days ago)

I’ve been using Microsoft Office for as long as I have owned a computer, and for a long time I never wondered whether there were any alternative programs available.  I just assumed that a document on the computer was a Word document and that was that.

As time went on, I soon came to realize that there are other Office type suites out there.  In fact, there were whole movements of people trying to create FREE alternatives to most all the Microsoft products.  FREE?  At least in the "I’m FREE to express myself peacefully" sense.

One particular movement is the Open Office software suite.  It comes with similar programs to Word, Excel and Powerpoint, they perform and look almost identical to the 2003 Microsoft versions, and even let you save to the Microsoft file format for sharing with the Office users.

Here’s the interesting part.  I had moved all my business files onto a new workstation this week, and somehow, all my personal Word files seemed to be corrupt.  I could only see crap when I opened them.  As a desperate measure I looked through my storage, "Where’s that disk with Open Office on it?!", and finally settled on downloading the latest version from Sun Microsystems.

I downloaded it, installed it, launched it and to my surprise, opened the documents right up and rendered them oh so nicely.  Then I noticed the "Make PDF" button.  Hmmm, I don’t have Acrobat installed, how can I make a PDF?  Well, it worked perfectly, the document was emailed as a PDF, the client successfully opened it, and the world was safe again.

Thanks Joe, your my hero.

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About Joseph R. B. Taylor

Joseph R. B. Taylor is a humble designer/developer who makes stuff for screens of all shapes and sizes. He is currently the lead UI/UX Architect at MScience, LLC, where he works to create simple experiences on top of large rich datasets for their customers and clients.