Imagine yourself as a thief. There are chances that you do something like:
Shoplifting
Printing counterfeit currency notes
Forge cheques
And if you get caught doing these crimes, what would happen to your social image? Can you walk on streets with your heads held high? You will be looked at as a criminal. If you try to think of all these, buying things could be cheaper, than shoplifting!
The crimes I just mentioned are not common and not done by decent people. But there is one crime which all of us do, and still not feel ashamed about it. I am sure it is not difficult to guess, it is Software piracy. Every time I insist on buying software, I look like an Idiot. People laugh at me. Just like bribery, Software piracy is into our bloodstream. One reason for this pathetic state is because Software is sometimes very costly(considering it is just a software!) and the another reason is not many freeware have the same quality as that of a software.
If we get quality freeware, would things change?
Microsoft Office is one stuff that we cannot do away with. We feel handicapped when we dont have this on our desktops. Yet not many buy this software. Most of the desktops that have this package would be pirated. After doing a crime of owning a pirated software, what is that we do with these at home? I am not able to think beyond: 1) A mouthshut review! 2) Resume 3) Expense tracking(sometimes). If you do just these try using Star Office 8. It would then be like you have a Genie that can do anything for you, but you use it only to wake you up in the morning.
In short, Star Office has an equivalent to almost all commonly used Microsoft Office programs. You can create documents(Word), Spreadsheets(Excel), Presentations(Powerpoint), Database(Access). It also adds a drawing tool. As a freeware, one natural thought that comes to our mind is that it has to be inferior. Also we are so much used to the Microsoft family that anything other than that feels different. The Star Office though, has a close-to Microsoft look and feel. Especially the Star Office Writer which looks almost like a MS-Word and StarOffice calc that is just like the Excel.
As for the features, the programs match Microsoft for every single option. StarOffice Writer is the one that I commonly use and few stuff in this work much better than Microsoft Word, for instance alignment. It even has additional features that Microsoft doesnt have. Like it has a navigator feature using which you can switch between tables in the document, headers in the document, bookmarks, etc. The most frequently used word appears as you type and you can just select that by pressing the enter(like dictionary mode on mobiles).
One other common feature that is small but very advantageous on all the StarOffice programs is the ability to produce pdf from the document(This is available only on recent Office 2007). You can also save the documents you create in equivalent Microsoft format, i.e. A StarOffice document as .doc or .xls and this solves some compatibility issues. And obviously you can edit document created using Microsoft Office.
I have started using StarOffice for all my small activities at home. I find this pretty comfortable now, though I had some getting-used-to trouble to begin with. All my initial problems had to do with the commands I used on Microsoft Office. To expect even the commands(like a shift+ F7 for thesaurus on Word, but Ctrl+ F7 on StarOffice Writer) would be unreasonable. I am also not sure on the recovery abilities of StarOffice, because it has never crashed even once and it has been about six months since I have started using this.
StarOffice is not without its share of disadvantages. Firstly, it takes quite a bit of time to start. But once it loads, it is pretty fast. Few things like reviewing(not the Mouthshut type of reviewing!) with comments and tracking changes were missing on StarOffice Writer. But that is the only feature I could spot missing on StarOffice in comparison to Microsoft.
You can download the StarOffice from pack.google.com. Just try it once. You would be surprised with the amount of closeness to Microsoft Office. It is not just a substitute to Microsoft, but a fantastic replacement, if not on office environments at least on home desktops. After all, this package comes from another renowned giant - Sun Microsystems. It is worth a try and if such high quality freeware products are available consistently, it can probably be a starting point to control Software piracy.
Smiles,
Envyram