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Non-profits should seriously consider using OpenOffice.org instead of Microsoft Office.

OpenOffice.org is free software. It is open source. It is compatible with Microsoft Office file formats… most of the time.

All of the places I’ve worked have used Microsoft Office software. That suite of software products is familiar to most people who have ever worked in an administrative position: Word, Powerpoint, Publisher, Excel, and Access. These file formats dominate our world. The file extensions (the last letters after the “.” in the file name) are everywhere:

Word: filename.doc
Powerpoint: filename.ppt
Publisher: filename.pub
Excel: filename.xls
Access: filename.mdb

I have met very few people that use anything beyond Word documents and the occasional Excel document. If this is you, OpenOffice is a great fit and will serve you well. You can open existing Word and Excel files, as well as save in these file formats using OpenOffice.

Download OpenOffice 2.2.1

However, if you use Publisher and Access extensively, you might have some problems with compatibility.

Microsoft Office’s Publisher, its layout software, has all kinds of problems of it’s own. It is a terrible program, unwieldy and prone to crashing and creating humongous files. Publisher files are not compatible between versions, so you will also have problems opening a Publisher file in Windows XP if that file was originally created in Windows 2000. OpenOffice offers an alternative layout program, but cannot open Publisher files (filename.pub).

Microsoft Office’s database software, Access, is very powerful. As much as I’ve tried, I cannot get the OpenOffice equivalent, Base, to work very well. If you need to use Access, OpenOffice cannot help you.

Read more about OpenOffice.org on Wikipedia