Back to school savings...How a parent or student can save $399 INSTANTLY

Sorry Microsoft but I gotta let this little known secret out to everyone who will hear me.

I was strolling through Best Buy, WalMart, and Target last week and I was appalled to see that they are already putting up Back to School sections or sales…it’s bad enough they advertise for Christmas in August but do they have to be the absolute killjoy to kids who are just barely breaking in their tans?

Being a parent myself, I can only imagine supplying my kids with the right/best tools to get the job done in school. But as I will show in later posts, the biggest and the so-called “best” is seldom of value to your kids or your wallet.

Take Microsoft OFFICE Standard Edition 2003 for example. It is without a doubt the gold standard Word Processor, Spreadsheet, Slide Presentation, Email suite. It also puts the hurt on you for $399 retail plus the insult of tax…OUCH! The so called “upgrade” price is no bargain for $239.99 either. So what’s a loving parent to do? Send Billy off to college with a rock and chisel to write his college term papers? Heck no! Resist the urge to buy the pre-installed 60 day trial that comes with almost every new computer / laptop or worse, shell out the 4 benjamins for the retail package. Instead get the SAME functionality and more for FREE. You read right. FREE, Nada, zip, nothing.

Enter Open Office 2.0.1…the FREE MS office alternative
Ok, I said it and if Bill Gates hears you say it he’s going to have chest pain. You get ALL the same stuff (with the exception of email but I’ll tell you about the the FREE Outlook alternative later) and do ALL the same things with OpenOffice. Man I was just like you and ponied up big for MS Office just to stumble across this FREE alternative to Office. I thought that no one could provide the same functionality, stability, and ease of use at a lower price, let alone for free. Boy was I wrong.

Now I’m not going to write a full review of OpenOffice, you can Google a gazillion reviews but I am going to tell you to just take 15 real minutes of your time playing with it before you say no to it. Why would I say this. Because looks can be deceiving. OpenOffice on the surface looks very sparse in its interface and I initially mistook this for lack of functionality or sophistication, hell I just come out and say it was ugly. But play with it for just one single minute and you’ll be hard pressed to find any faults with it.

Here’s the skinny on OpenOffice…It is by no means a compromise because you can still open Microsoft Word docs in it and save your own documents in Microsoft Word format, you can also save in PDF format. It has 99.99999% all the bells and whistles of MS Word. Ditto for its version of Excel called CALC and its Excel counterpart called IMPRESS. Again, you can open Excel or Powerpoint presentations in OpenOffice and you can save in their format too. DRAW’s animation and visual effects are simply kick ass and dare I say even better than PowerPoint. Here’s another kicker. OpenOffice also comes with a database program and a free alternative to Microsoft Visio Standard (an additional $199 retail completely separate from any MS office version) called DRAW. It’s simply an AWESOME tool if you’ve gotta draw complex diagrams, illustrations, or flowcharts.

Now for email, you need a Microsoft Outlook alternative. By far, I say choose Thunderbird from the guys at Mozilla. Again, it costs nothing and does nearly every single thing Outlook does and dare I say again, more.

So parents, tell Billy to stop worrying about having to write with rock and chisel and download these freebies (links at bottom). Take a sigh of relief because I just saved you $399. Now I just found you a way to buy that Apple IPod he swears he has to have Better yet, take those 4 Benjamins and spend it on yourself or even better yet…invest it in shares of Apple or Starbucks and laugh all the way to the bank four years from now from all the money you made.

http://www.openoffice.org
http://www.mozilla.org

P.S. These suckers are truly FREE. They are NOT trial or “limited” versions. They are NOT Advertisement driven. They are NOT filled with spyware. They are FULL free versions right out of the box. Why would they give their stuff away for free? The hell if I know, probably some hippie tree hugging opensource do-gooders decided to program them, but I do know they are truly free so take advantage of them now!

Money’s tight…save your dough…say YES I SAVED!