Free Office Apps

Free and live office applications are the wave of the future. You pay (either directly or indirectly) for office applications like Microsoft Office and Apple iWork. These are great applications and they definitely are used by the majority of users. But, they aren't free and they aren't yet live. Free and live office applications are the wave of the future - so what does that mean?

Free Office Applications: I will only be talking about free office applications from here on out. They are free because they are typically open source and because the organizations that developed them make them free. Star Office and Open Office are great examples of such applications. They are free and contain many of the same applications that Office and iWork contain. These applications provide very good free alternatives to software packages that cost around $80. However, they aren't live either. So let's get to what a live office application is.

Live Office Applications: Live means online. Thats the clearest definition. An online office application is one that uses web applications to create files (documents, spreadsheets, presentations, etc). That means that you can write a paper, for example, using your web browser and an online application. You can then save your document on your hard drive or online. Saving the document online will enables access to that file from anywhere where the internet is available (which is almost everywhere). These live web applications are available for free through sites like Google Docs. That is where these two concepts come together.

In the next 2 posts I will introduce 2 ways to make office files (documents, presentations, and spreadsheets) for free and online. Sorry this was a blah blah blah post. I probably could have just stopped writing after the first paragraph and just put blah blah blah and no one would have been able to tell the difference because they would have stopped reading by then.