M$ Office 2010 beta - free

Not sure if ayone here is interested in this sort of thing but theres a free trial of Office 2010 - license until Oct 2010 I think ...
I've been using it for a short while and had no probs whatsoever, but its beta so use at your own risk.

http://www.microsoft.com/office/2010/en/default.aspx

Our company policy is to use Open Source.
Licence is free and unlimited.
You only need to pay for support, but just like RAOC, there is an excellent forum to get your problems fixed.

OpenOffice has a very similair look and feel to MS-Office too.

http://www.openoffice.org

A good feature is that you can export directly to PDF format.

I work in IT and everyone I have worked for uses M$ office, so I need to know that for work ... I've never really got round to properly trying OpenOffice

M$ Office has a pdf creator in as well - just save as pdf.

[BIG_MVS]

Office 2003 works fine for me. It's like Windows XP, it's pretty much sorted and there is no real benefit in upgrading..

I work in IT too but have more the attitude of "if it ain't broke...."

Office 2003 works fine for me. It's like Windows XP, it's pretty much sorted and there is no real benefit in upgrading..

I work in IT too but have more the attitude of "if it ain't broke...."

I agree with the sentiment, but M$ will pull support for earlier versions to force everybody to upgrade ... Barclays got fined millions for running unsupported software last year.
For me though I need to know the new stuff as the outsourcing company I currently work for are all ready working on bids to roll out win7 and 2010.

Ahh, a few IT guys here then.

Im a IT Manager of a large company with 16 offices world wide.
I use Office 2003 Pro across all 2100 machines. And have no plans to migrate !.

You're safe for now - M$ are supporting winxp and office 2k3 until 2014 - so no need to upgrade until then ... It'll all be virtual by then anyway

Just being on the latest is not always the greatest.

I have been to the Surrey Satalitte technology centre, They launch plenty of units each year and you may be surprised to hear that they use 386 processing power and Win-95. This is because it is stable and they know how it behaves when it goes wrong. Also the 386 has some special properties which make it nuclear resistant.

Just like we like running old cars, latest is no where near greatest!

I can tell you that Open Office does take some getting used to, many staff have been resistant to "the change".

[quote="simontaylor"]

Just like we like running old cars, latest is no where near greatest!

quote]

Glad you said that Simon, i was gonna say the more you upgrade 'em the slower they go