Thing #18

OpenOffice provides a free office suite similar to Microsoft Office. The tools are presented in much the same way as Office. At home and at work, I use Microsoft Office 2003. I found that the OpenOffice tools work much the same. I believe the main difference between the two involves open source versus for-fee. I believe this difference is important to a large organization, such as a school. For example, open source software is supported by a volunteer user community. If the school were to need technical support, it would have to contact the supporting organization, request help, and wait for a response. On the other hand, Microsoft provides on-demand technical support. Of course, it comes at a price. I think that open source would work well in a more limited setting where technical support is not so critical.