EDge21 Freeware Festival - Open/Neo Office

I'm know among my colleagues as the King of Freeware. The only commercial software I have installed on any of my computers is iWork on my Macs because I love Keynote so much.

I thought this week I'd share several of the best freeware applications available to encourage those of you who are still slaves to the man!

Today's featured applications are the free alternatives to Microsoft Office: OpenOffice and NeoOffice.

OpenOffice.org 3 is the leading open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It works on Windows, Mac, and Linux computers and is available in many languages. It can be downloaded and used completely free of charge for any purpose.

By default, all your data is saved in an international open standard format, but it can also read and write files in other common office software formats including MS Office and MS Office 2007. A great feature is one-button PDF generation.

OpenOffice Writer Screenshot

OpenOffice Impress screenshot

Because OpenOffice is one piece of software, everything works consistently between applications. Even the help system is the same. Many people already have documents which have been created using other common office software. OpenOffice can open most of these files with a high degree of accuracy, making implementing OpenOffice very straightforward.

NeoOffice is a full-featured set of office applications for Mac OS X built on the OpenOffice.org office suite. NeoOffice has integrated dozens of specific Mac features and sports a Mac-like UI. It can import, edit, and exchange files with other popular office programs such as Microsoft Office. NeoOffice offers better stability and more speed in the OS X environment than OpenOffice.

NeoOffice Calc screenshotSee a NeoOffice video demo

Like OpenOffice, NeoOffice is free to download and use.