I became A big fan of Star Office then Open Office while I was at Sun Microsytems.
I am a firm beleiver it's better to use Open source software rather than pirate from Microsoft.
However some Vendor's software is tightly coupled to Micro$oft. It would be nice to see more vendor agnostic software.
Case in point:
My wife was working on converting a client from Simply Accounting to Quickbooks. Quickbooks has a feature to allow you to import customers and vendors via Excel spreadsheet.
We had the spreadsheet exported in Open Office calc and went into Quickbooks (QB) import utility.
Then QB complained we did not have Excel installed....
Long story (even longer) we then downloaded MS Office 2010. At least M$ is getting less greedy for the Home & Student edition. 25% discount until Jan 6, 2011. It $119 CDN.
Did I just give a free plug for Microsoft??
After finally getting Windows XP service pack 3 (required) then the 35 windows updates that followed it works.
We started the Office download and the Windows update in 2010 (New years eve) and finished in 2011.
Price:
- MS Office Upgrade -$ 119. (30 minutes download)
- Downloading & install Service pack3 - time overnight
- 35 windows updates - 2 hours
Time saved retyping 3600 customers & several suppliers: Priceless.
My wife reports her last conversion took about 60 hours of rekeying data.
