At our Tuesday, February 7, General Meeting, Jim Scheef, former DACS president, will present several free, compatible alternatives to Microsoft Office. It’s hard to believe that there are a number of offerings out there that are both free, Micro-soft compatible, and run on multiple platforms, such as Linux, Windows and Mac..

The two offerings he will focus on will be:

1. OpenOffice.org 2.0
2.ThinkFree Office Online beta

OpenOffice.org 2.0 is the productivity suite that individuals, governments, and corporations around the world have been expecting for the last two years. Easy to use and fluidly interoperable with every major office suite, OpenOffice.org 2.0 realizes the potential of open source.

With new features, advanced XML capabilities and native support for the OASIS Standard OpenDocument format, OpenOffice.org 2.0 gives users around the globe the tools to be engaged and productive members of their society without having to use Microsoft products.

ThinkFree Office Online?
Think you can’t open Office documents without paying hundreds of dollars for software? Think again! Just visit ThinkFree Office Online and you can open, edit, and create Office documents with this easy and convenient online service, new from ThinkFree.

With ThinkFree Office Online you can:

• Create Microsoft Office-compatible documents from the Web
• Open and edit your Office documents anywhere and anytime
• Post documents directly to your blog without any conversion
• Create powerful Web presentations using a familiar interface
• Convert your existing documents to PDF format

ThinkFree Office offers all this in an online fashion, so you can create, input, and modify Office formatted documents from any Internet terminal world- wide. It also allows you to save your documents in the widely used PDF format.

ThinkFree Office is currently in beta test.

For those interested in an a compatible alternative to the very expensive Microsoft Office line of products this will be an excellent way for you to learn about some of the packages available out there.

This meeting is open and free to everyone so invite anyone you know who would be interested in this topic.