The Microsoft Office suite has become a standard with its MS Word, PowerPoint, Excel, etc. Once you have started tapping into the projects that can be made with some of the tools in your homeschool, it can become very useful and motivating for those kids who love computers. The problem for many has been the pricetag. well, it is a problem no more. Let me introduce you to Open Office. Open Office has everything that MS Office has and then some. It can open and save to Microsoft Office file formats.

We use PowerPoint quite a bit around here, but because of the MS Office price tag it is only on my machine. The kids just have to make an appointment with this machine when they want to make a presentation. When I added RAM to my system, suddenly Microsoft Office says I cannot use it until I use the disk - probably a security measure to catch illegal copies or sales of Office software. We have a legal installation, but it came preinstalled on our computer. The software is enmeshed in the system recovery disk. For some reason my computer will not even see that that disk is in my disk drive. In the middle of my frustration of not being able to restore MS Office, my son suggested I try Open Office. I really didn't expect much out of it. I figured that it would be a watered down copycat of MS Office. I must say, I have been astounded that it not only can do all that MS Office can do, but it goes well beyond it - and it is downloadable and free because it is an open source program. Volunteer programmers made it with the purpose of free distribution and flexible modification.

In addition to having MS Office-like programs in the suite it also has a very nice drawing program and a math equation/formula maker. You can learn more about it and get the link to the 91mb zip file download at www.openoffice.org.

If you are new to presentation makers (like PowerPoint or Open Office's Impress), you may find that both MS Office and Open Office are a bit lacking in examples. They have wizards and templates, but that isn't really very helpful to a complete novice who really needs to see completed examples to understand what the program can do in the homeschool setting. For those, here are some links to some websites with example files:

http://jc-schools.net/PPTs-socst.html

http://www.internet4classrooms.com/on-line_powerpoint.htm

You will need to have installed Open Office, have Microsoft Power Point, or have downloaded the free PowerPoint viewer from the Microsoft Office website to see the examples posted on these two websites.