The Harbour Pilot

You are a small or medium business. You expect to get top value for your dollar, because that is how you operate in every area. This is particularly true of office infrastructure, which contributes little to the value you deliver to your customers. Nor do you like being bullied and lied to by major vendors of products, to whom you are not a valuable client.

If we have just described you - then save your money and go get Open office. Here’s how.

The download link is here.

Check your system requirements (see link on right side of screen) but at time of writing the requirements are

• Windows 98 or better,
• 128 MBytes of Ram, although 256 is much better,
• 800 Mbytes of hard drive space (falling back to 450 MBytes after-install), and
• a screen resolution of 800 x 600 with 256 colours.

(note that the Microsoft requirements are somewhat higher for Office 2007 - about twice of everything is either required or recommended.)

If you click on the large blue Windows text in the upper left, you will be taken to the Windows download page. Mac users, obviously should select the Mac OSX link. I would mention the Linux version, but I assume that Linux users already have OO, and if not, can certainly handle this without any further assistance.

The download execution will start as soon as you click on the green link, and specify the local hard drive destination directory.

The download including the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) is some 120 Mb, and took about 45 minutes on low speed broadband.

Open office provides specific step-by-step instructions for downloading and installing the suite. Simply follow the bouncing ball - you will find that it is seamless…

There is also a pdf file that describes all of the desired configuration and set-up steps to take here (and it includes screen captures images of the few screens that you will be navigating, although you probably do not need it) , or it can be downloaded, after you choose the language for the guide.

Total time to install and first access the Writer and Calc programs - 4 minutes on top of the download time. You are a total of less than 60 minutes away from using Open Office.

You will get access to the suite by navigating through the Start>Programs>Open Office >Open Office… Writer (or Calc, Draw, impress etc.) You can of course, create shortcuts yourself to put on your desktop if that is your preferred method.
You are now ready to “be productive”.

Oh, and welcome to Open Office… and freedom!

Next up…. a discussion about using some of the productivity suite - mostly on Calc, and Writer, together with some tutorials, inks to video and graphic tutorials and User’s Guides.