Open Office is a very powerful piece of free office software and it does everything that Microsoft Office offers. One of the big features that a business needs is the ability to mail merge documents and labels. 

Open Office handles mail merge differently to Microsoft Office, since you create your mail merged documents from a toolbar in Microsoft Office, you print them to a file in Open Office.

I have created a video screen cast that demonstrates how to install Open Office and set it up for the UK and set its defaults to save in common Microsoft formats (word.doc, excel.xls and powerpoint.ppt)

You have probably sent a word document to a friend only to find they can't open the file since you have sent it with Office 2007 and they have an older version. 

1. Go to the flag in the circle and click. You will see two options on the bottom right of the menu.
2. Click on Word Options. 
3. On the left side, click on Save
4. On the right side, change the drop down box to WORD 97-2003 .doc
5. Click OK

Now whenever you save files in Word, you will save them in a format that people with older versions can open them.

The same goes for Excel and Powerpoint.

OpenOffice 3.1 has been released with some enhancements such as better screen appearance, easier dragging of icons which show a shadow when moving, and the introduction of overlining - the opposite of underlining. The word processor boasts better grammar checks and improved highlighting. Personally, I'm waiting for go-oo.org to update to 3.1 since it has support for Microsoft Works and Office 2007.

When the first volume of Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming was published in 1969, it was typeset using hot metal type set by a Monotype Corporation typecaster with a hot metal typesetting machine from the 19th century which produced a "good classic style" appreciated by Knuth.

When the second edition of the second volume was published, in 1976, the whole book had to be typeset again because the Monotype technology had been largely replaced by photographic techniques, and the original fonts were no longer available. However, when Knuth received the galley proofs of the new book on 30 March 1977, he found them awful.

Ever since Adobe created their Portable Document Format (PDF) as something that can be opened anywhere in the world with their free software, and the flexibility of the format has made it accepted by printers and publishers as their default format for publishing. Book writers now find they need to submit their proofs to a printer in PDF format because its easier for them and as they don't need to use several packages its cheaper too. Foxit Reader by Foxit software is a much smaller and faster program for opening and printing PDF files than the standard Adobe reader. Also, since Adobe has extended the features of PDF with support for VRML and others features that most people will never need or understand, they have bloated their program. Foxit reader has none of these features which makes it so much leaner and faster. Primo PDF is a piece of software that pretends to be a printer. As far as you are concerned, its a printer. Print from any program and it will produce a PDF file of that printed output. You can add protection to your PDF if you fancy stopping people from saving, editing or printing the PDF and you can protect it with a simple password. Open Officecan export your documents as PDF, so you don't need a separate program to print them.

Abiword is a very compact word processor but manages to offer most of what Microsoft Word does, and you can read and write Word documents. You can create text boxes and even mail merge from a database. Open Office is a free replacement for Microsoft Office suite. It offers similar features but can easily be expanded from a wide variety of extensions. It also supports export to PDF format. Go-OO extends the standard Open Office with full support for Microsoft's scripting language, Office 2007 formats and Works import support. Scribus is a free DTP program and you choose how you wish to lay out your content. If you ever need to go beyond producing a word processed document, perhaps you wish to make a booklet or mini brochures you need a DTP (DeskTop Publishing) program. The concept of DTP is vastly different from using a word processor. When writing a letter, you simply type your contents onto the page and add the graphics later. With DTP, you create the look of the page before introducing the text and graphics. Write each article as a document and import the article into the page(s) you are working with, you have full control over the flow of the words on the page using text boxes. Lyx is a document processor that encourages an approach to writing based on the structure of your documents (WYSIWYM) and not simply their appearance (WYSIWYG). With a word processor, you simply type something and it appears great on the page, but change the paper size and you find you will have to reformat. If you worked with the structure, changing the size wouldn't be a problem. Lyx is for people that write and want their writing to look great, right out of the box. No more endless tinkering with formatting details, 'finger painting' font attributes or futzing around with page boundaries. You just write. In the background, Prof. Knuth's legendary TeX typesetting engine makes you look good. On screen, LyX looks like any word processor; its printed output -- or richly cross-referenced PDF, just as readily produced -- looks like nothing else. Gone are the days of industrially bland .docs, all looking similarly not-quite-right, yet coming out unpredictably different on different printer drivers. Gone are the crashes 'eating' your dissertation the evening before going to press. With LyX, short notes or letters are a snap. LyX really shines, though, when composing complex documents like technical documentation, doctoral theses and conference proceedings.