Pledge “openofficenow”
"I will use Open Office all the time instead of Microsoft Office but only if 22 other people will do the same."
— Cybersavvy, Open Source convert
Deadline to sign up by: 1st July 2007
65 people signed up (43 over target)
More details
For years, far too many of us have assumed that the software which comes pre-installed on our computers is the only choice. So, we use Outlook, Microsoft Word, Access etc instead of looking to see whether there is an alternative produced, for free, by a company or community other than Mr Gates.
It takes very little time to investigate solid, Open Source, free applications which can often do the job far better than proprietary and expensive software which benefits shareholders and not the user.
Open Office is one such fantastic application which has far more functionality than the Microsoft equivalent, and yet many people don't know about it, haven't downloaded it, and don't use it.
Schools, community groups, small businesses and individuals, let alone large corporates, government bodies etc could save an awful lot of money if they jsut used Open Office and stopped assuming Microsoft is the only answer.
www.OpenOffice.org should be your first stop.
When you know that this software can automatically turn a Word doc into a PDF for free, that it includes at least as much functionality as MS Office, that it can save pretty much any OO document as an MS or other equivalent, and that it is supported by a huge community of developers who work for free, with the support of Sun Microsystems, then surely it is worth a few minutes of your time to escape from the restrictions of being tied to one proprietary, expensive system and all its limitations.
- vote for Hank Williams Jr. in the Primary Election
- give a percentage or more of the Canton Free TV project of $4000
- to support my African American sisters and brothers businesses
- Be Keen on Clean
See more pledges, and all about how PledgeBank works.
Things to do with this pledge
Current signatories (
= they've done it)
Cybersavvy, the Pledge Creator, joined by:
- cyberdoyle
- marie
- Paul
- Allan Lewis
- Helen Anderson
- ssam
- Dorothy Pipet
- Adrian Kosmaczewski
- Adam Bagnall
- Elysia Womersley
- Claire
- Jason (Hootiegibbon)
- Josh Stegmaier
- Felipe Cepriano
- Robert Gilaard
- jan klopper
- Joseph Harrison
- Lauri Virtanen
- Dan Richardson
- Stian Rødven Eide
- gnosis
- Tim Erwin
- Chris Wagner
- Rodrigo Lanas
- Jon Ramvi
- Mourad BOUFARGUINE
- Andrew Schott
- Guy Johnston
- William Jones
- benjamin wagner
- Jester DeCruz
- Mark william Darbyshire
- Frode
- Sunnz
- Adam Bates
- Michael Thorne
- Paul Waring
- alastair green
- Mahesh Ramamurthy
- lachlan currie
- trevor.waterfield
- Bruce Alan Martin ("BAM")
- Ann Rapstoff
- Phil Thompson
- Debbie Fournier
- Freeman
- Heather
- Heather
- Alekĉjo
- Les Rose`
- Marko Norkroos
- James Deeks
- Benjamin Goodger
- Anji Capes
- Eric Klemm
- Isharra Jamari
- Daniel Mota Leite
- 8 people who did not want to give their names, 1 of whom has done the pledge
Comments on this pledge
I can buy a good computer for £400 so why spend at least 40% more on top buying MS Office when OO is free and has more functionality and a much more active development community.
Also, a couple of notes about MS Office alternatives:
1) OpenOffice is significantly slower than MS Office in my experience -- running it on old PCs is difficult.
2) Has anyone tried AbiWord (word processor -- http://www.abisource.com/) and Gnumeric (spreadsheet -- http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnumeric/)?
Obviously, these are only good if you don't need presentation software or a graphical database, but they are much faster than OpenOffice.
AbiWord can't save as PDF but you can get PrimoPDF for Windows (installs as a printer -- http://www.primopdf.com/) to make PDFs from any print-capable application.
Gnumeric is excellent -- especially its graphing function (better than Excel IMHO!).
Anyway, good luck with the pledge!
Web Browser: Firefox http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/
Mail Client: ThunderBird
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/thunderbird/
A widows media player10 replacement: Audacity
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
Image Manipulation(photoshop replacement):
http://www.gimp.org/about/
All the above have windows versions there are many more.
Visit the Free Software Foundation:
http://www.fsf.org/
And even have a cost (£ or $) free operating system (breath new life into old hardware).
I use a Linux Distribution www.pclinuxos.com (an easy to use operating system that will run from cd without touching your hard drive) another to look at is Puppy Linux http://www.puppylinux.org or visit www.distrowatch.com for other distributions (types) of Linux.
there are also other free/opensource operating systems BSD and Solaris.
I feel strongly about open source
hope you vist the websites
Jase
Thanks for that - I'm aware about all those apps :)
However, this pledge is about office software. I imagine that most people reading this are aware of Firefox (look at its market penetration...) and some of the other apps, although perhaps not Linux. The thing with office apps is that MS Office costs £100s whereas an OS (ok, Windows!) is usually pre-installed on a PC (and only costs £60 OEM anyway) and there are lots of free media players, so why go open source for that? (FYI, Audacity is an audio editor, not a player.)
Having said that, I must endorse Gimp - does 90% of what Photoshop does, accepts Photoshop filters, and is completely free! If I wasn't a poor student, I'd donate to them :)
If you want to use it on a Windows computer that doesn't have it installed, you can get a copy to install on a USB flash drive, portable hard drive, iPod, etc. at http://www.portableapps.com . I find that really useful for working at university.
Another reason OO.o is better than MS Office is that it uses OpenDocument, an open format which can be freely used in any software, as opposed to Microsoft's secret proprietary formats which they deliberately make as hard as possible to use with other software.
thanks and I love open source stuff what about http://www.flickr.com too
www.annrapstoff.co.uk
The best way to help solve this problem is to use OpenOffice's default OpenDocument Format (ODF) instead, which has open specifications, so anyone can easily support it in their software, and to discourage other people from sending you MS Office files (such as Word documents). It's quite easy for MS Office users to save their data in open formats such as PDF and HTML, and there's various different plugins being developed to let them save to ODF.
There's a good article at http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-at... about the problems with using Word files for users of free (as in freedom) software such as OpenOffice.
Portable document format (PDF) was invented for this reason, so it looks the same to everybody.
I've tried saving mine as many different types--MS Word, .rtf, html--and every time I reopen it, it's all screwy in various ways. Usually my headers disappear.
You can you tell me step-by-step (I'm kind of a techno-dope)? thanks
I recommend using PDF to send people documents, as it has open specifications and doesn't have any problems with patents, so anyone can open it properly (assuming they have the appropriate software, which almost everyone does). OpenOffice can save to PDF very easily. There's even a button on the main toolbar to do so directly.
If you need to send a document which the other person can edit, I recommend using OpenDocument Format (ODF), OpenOffice's default format, because it also has open specs and no patent problems. MS Office users can't open it at the moment, but there's various different plugins being developed to let them do so, including one which is funded by Microsoft.
http://blogs.sun.com/dancer/entry/what_s...
et al.