The best desktop publishing software

Microsoft has dominated the desktop publishing software market for years. Most people still use it mainly because that is all they know. There are still many people who don't know that Adobe has a wonderful package that can do everything Microsoft office can do. Then there is one desktop publishing software that mainly the corporate world knows about, and it is really so much easier to use than the other two. That software is called OpenOffice.

OpenOffice can be found at their website www.openoffice.org. They are a company offering freeware software for others to have in lieu to the spending all that money on those money grabbing softwares you spend your hard earned dollars on. From a computer technician's perspective, "This software can work in conjunction with your other publishing software due to it's amazing compatibilty with it." You will find that it has many of the same thing what other publishing software has and so much more.

When I first started using OpenOffice I thought,"Well, here's another copycat of Microsoft's Office Suite." Boy! Was I wrong! This is not to say that I am a developer of any kind (that means software developer to those of you who don't know), but you can reprogram OpenOffice to fit your every need. The place where I work has a programming department that has taken this open-source software and duplicated all of the Microsoft's Office Suite to the point of making OpenOffice even better. The ease of using the new Writer, Spreadsheet, Power Presentations, etc. make it so efficient to use without all the wonder of how to make it work. I was hooked.

The only drawback, for me, to using this software is matching the size of the text made by another program. Sometimes even the same exact text can be slightly off in size and shape. Although I have not used Adobe's matching publishing software, nor Corel's, I do not see why everyone has not switched over to OpenOffice. Sure it may take you about 20 to 30 minutes to match the text for a form, but once you have it all in play it will be well worth it. There have been so many times our laminated forms were accidentally thrown away, but because I had made the new forms on the computer hidden from being deleted, we were able to print off the new form and start all over again.

After working in my current position for two years, I still did not know that OpenOffice was a freeware until my surpervisor found out what I was doing and encouraged me to go home, download the program to my computer, and learn it well. Well, I am now the coordinator for the department I have been working in because due to learning how to use OpenOffice. What I did not understand was why we had a part of the program to mimic FrontPage for a retail bisness. That just seemed rather odd.

The odd thing was that I had the software on a disk and did not know it until I finally decided to load this cheap software I had bought to learn website design. Until then I have always made a website with only notepad and MS Paint. Within Cosmi's website software was OpenOffice. The more I learned, the better I became at making a webpage. With the ease of OpenOffice, I was able to make a fantastic home page in just under an hour with text, audio, and images. This software is so easy to use.

Before you start to dismiss this program, check it out for yourself. Oh, and I have used Corel's wordperfect, which I did not like even before Corel bought them out. This is not meant to date myself, but OpenOffice is much more easy to use than WordStar ever was. Download it today to try it for your self. You will be amazed and wonder why you ever used any of the others.

By : Harold Sink.