W. H. Auden has a wonderful poem, In Praise of Limestone. It ends:

… when I try to imagine a faultless love
Or the life to come, what I hear is the murmur
Of underground streams, what I see is a limestone landscape.

Well, for me, Open Office has some of these qualities too! If you are from a corporate background, you may have difficulty with the notion that you no longer have to pay for the best services and products. The Open Source movement, with its armies of dedicated developers, deserves our gratitude and admiration. It was born with the idealism of the hippy generation in its heart and it is quietly and unobtrusively changing our lives.

One good outcome of this economic downturn is that organizations are starting to question more closely how they spend their money.

In times of difficulty, particularly, it is incumbent on all of us to ask the right questions of our leaders. Employees’ jobs depend on caring and listening leadership. Shareholders and subcontractors need to know that wise decisions are being made on their behalf. One of the questions that you should be asking your leaders now is: “Why are you not using Open Office across your organization when it is every bit as good as any other alternative and it can be downloaded from www.openoffice.org without charge and works comfortaby with Windows operating systems?”

This tutorial was made over 18 months ago and provides a balanced summary of Open Office. Open Office 3 is now out and it rocks all the more!

I invite you to contribute your thoughts on and experiences of Open Office below. In particular, I invite the leaders of any organization that does not use Open Office to justify their decision, and particularly the leaders of organizations that require the taxpayer to help them out at the moment. This is a saving that every organization should be able to make, saving their funds to improve their service and the lives of their customers, employees, contractors and shareholders.

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