There are some changes that are so big that you need a collection of events to happen in order to make the change - no single stimulus is enough. So it has been for me this month with my decision to abandon something that has been a central part of my daily working life for over ten years. I'm talking about Microsoft Office. Setting up in business on my own has meant that I've had to start sorting out my own IT - like buying Office for my new laptop. A complete install was going to set me back not far off £500. A high price, but the thought of doing anything else though almost didn't enter my head. Then one morning recently I joined a couple of dozen or so other local IT professionals to hear about "How to Make Money from Open Source", a seminar run by Open Advantage - an AWM funded project, held at iCentrum - the home of another AWM ICT project. Whilst concentrating on how to actually earn revenue through playing a part in the open source movement, it was obvious that there were significant cost savings businesses could make by moving to open-source software. I'd had a Sun salesman try to sell me the benefits of StarOffice - the predecessor to OpenOffice - several years ago, and hadn't been impressed. But then I wasn't faced with a £500 bill to buy my own copy of Microsoft Office. Also, I had recently started using Mozilla's Firefox as my standard web browser having got fed up with all the malware that Internet Explorer appeared to attract. Well, I thought, it won't hurt to give it a try, so I went to sourceforge.com, where most of the good open source software lives. The OpenOffice download was around 100MB, it installed without a problem, and within 20 minutes of starting it was up and running. What struck me at first was just how similar to Microsoft the applications were. Most things worked as you expected them to, menu and toolbar options were similar, but the applications had none of the clunkiness or geekiness which I'd expected. I was delighted to find that OpenOffice would read any Microsoft Office document without a hitch, no matter how complex, and would save it in Microsoft or OpenOffice format. OpenOffice is far more of an integrated system than Microsoft Office. No matter what "application" I'm using I can start a new presentation, document or spreadsheet from the standard File menu. Also, if I create a pallet of colours for a presentation, then they are still there when I draw a diagram in a document. The real joy came when I realised that OpenOffice will save any document type as PDF - no need to buy a separate programme. Downsides? I'm not sure how I'm going to get OpenOffice documents onto my Palm, it doesn't guess document titles very well, and I can't find a button to page through slides in edit mode, or to step through font sizes, but that's about it. So pleased have I been with the experience that I've now loaded OpenOffice onto my PC as well. SourceForge is also my first port of call when I need a new piece of software. So sorry Mr Gates, but the open source community has won me over. Now I've just got to decide what to spend the £500 I saved. * David Burden runs his own technology and marketing consultancy, Daden Consulting. Past, unedited, articles can be found on his blog at www.daden.co.uk/blogand he can be contacted at david.burden@daden.co.uk. | 
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