A new small business faces a many spending decisions around infrastructure, facilities and professional services. Of these the IT setup costs can be a significant portion. One area of expense is software and in particular licensing each employees PC with the Micorosft Office suite of applications (including Word, Excel and PowerPoint). It’s important for most businesses to be able to create and exchange Word and Excel documents and so this may seem like a spending area that has no other choice.
However an “Open Source” alternative exists that can be downloaded called OpenOffice.org and is available from here:
OpenOffice 3 is the leading open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It’s available in many languages and works on all common computers. It stores all your data in an international open standard format and can also read and write files from ther common office software packages. The best bit is that it can be downloaded and used completely free of charge for any purpose.
As an initial step or as a long term implementation more and more businesses are installing OpenOffice as an alternative to Microsoft Office – the cost savings are typically £200 per user.
If you need any advice then please contact me at david@bgcit.co.uk
Problem free computing will be a reality.
