I have now used all the progams in the suite and with the exception of Base (the alternative to Access) they are working really well and I have no complaints. However, Base stinks! Even with all my experience with Access and looking at all the tutorials, I have completely given up!
Those of you who follow my posts know how much I LOVE free things and this product is one of the most amazing free products I've ever seen! I'm so excited to report a free and extraordinary alternative to Microsoft I can't hardly stand it. The name of the product is LibreOffice. I needed to find an alternative to Excel and found one alternative that was Chinese (which shall remain nameless) so I didn't go that route and found LibreOffice. Wikipedia describes it thus: "LibreOffice is a free and open-source office productivity software suite, a project of The Document Foundation. It was forked in 2010 from OpenOffice.org, an open-sourced version of the earlier StarOffice." I tried to find out who owned The Document Foundation, but came up with nothing so far. It has Writer Document (MS Word), Calc Spreadsheet (MS Excel), Impress Presentation (MS PowerPoint), Draw Drawing (MS?), Math Formula (MS?), Base Database (MS Access). So far, I've just used Calc Spreadsheet extensively and have played around with the others. I'm especially looking forward to playing around with Base Database, since I was an MS Access database developer for nearly 14 years. Every feature is there as far as I can tell and some of them are even better. For instance, I've always used the thesaurus feature in MS Word, but it doesn't replace the word with the new choice, but LibreOffice does. However, the MS thesaurus is more comprehensive than LibreOffice. But, I just can't say enough good things about this program. There's only one negative I've found so far and that's their templates. They aren't as good as Microsoft, but I just transferred them from MS to LibreOffice (Shhh!). Cutting and pasting from one to the other is also done with ease. So, I'd like say to Mr. Bill Gates p-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-t!