I love free software. I love it partly because I’m on a budget and a lot of the software that I like is very expensive, and partly because I love the idea that there are folks out there who believe in writing great software that is free for everyone. I certainly think that software developers should be paid for their work and that they should be able to sell the products that they create – after all, I sell some of my work. But, it’s great when you can see a balance between work that you get paid for and work that you give away. I try to balance the two in my life, but that’s a topic for another day.

So what is the software that I’m writing about today? It’s OpenOffice.org 3.This is the software that you can use to replace Microsoft Word. OpenOffice.org 3 does word processing, spreadsheets, databases, presentations, and graphics. You can load it on to any operating system – I use it on my Macs as well as on my Windows based machines. You can import a document from Word and work with it in OpenOffice.org 3.You can save your documents as PDF, which is one of the things that I really like about this software. When I save Word documents in PDF the hyperlinks never work, but with OpenOffice.org 3, making a PDF document is simple.

Because OpenOffice.org 3 is open-source, you can download it for free, you can use it for personal projects, commercial projects, educational projects or whatever it is that you wish. If you’re a developer, you can work on this software. If you’re just the average user, you will find that OpenOffice.org 3 is simple to use if you’ve used any other type of office software before.

What are some other benefits? This software comes in a variety of languages. Downloading is simple as is the installation once you’ve completed your download. Because this is open-source software, all updates are free, you never have to worry about buying the latest and greatest version like you do with Word.

I’m sold on OpenOffice.org 3 and use it for all my projects now. Check it out. Once you use it, you’ll be hooked.