Just a short post to let everyone know that the latest version of Open Office (the free alternative to MS Office) now comes with an Australian English dictionary pre-installed.
In the past, some work was required to find and install an Australian English Dictionary. Ubuntu comes with Australian English included within Open Office but I just noticed that it is now also included in the latest version (Open Office 3.1) that you can download from http://www.openoffice.org/.
Open Office can be a good alternative for many people and it runs on Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7 as well as Apple Mac OSX.
I have installed it on my computer running Windows 7 and my Mac Book. The process in each case was painless. It automatically picked up from my Windows 7 and Mac OSX installations that Australian English was to be the default dictionary.
Open Office Version 3.1 looks and works a lot like MS Office 2003 and comes with:
- A word processor caller “Writer”
- An Excel like program called “Calc”
- A 3D graphics drawing program that can also be used as an alternative to Publisher called “Draw”
- A Power Point alternative called “Impress”
- A program for Mathematical equations called “Math”
- A MS Access alternative called “Base”
If you have paid for the less expensive Home & Student version of Office 2007 that comes with only Word,Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote, you could also install all or part of Open Office to get access to programs that work like the additional components included in the more expensive versions of Office.
I will now be using Open Office instead of iWorks on my Apple Mac Book . Open Office did a much better job of opening Microsoft Office documents than the corresponding applications in Apple iWorks.
Whereas Apple Numbers does not handle the Excel formatting, charts etc well at all, Open Office “Calc” did a very good job. I also note that Open Office can read and write to the new Office 2007 document format (.docx & .xlsx etc).