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One feature of OpenOffice makes me laugh at the poor design of Microsoft Office. Have you ever tried to open a file in Word and accidentally clicked an Excel spreadsheet instead? In Microsoft Office, the file opens as garbage characters inside of Word. OpenOffice does it right and starts OpenOffice Calc to properly handle the spreadsheet.

If you don't want an entire office suite but need a good writing application, try AbiWord. This open source word processor handles WordPerfect file formats (which Microsoft Word doesn't) and also handles documents with 100,000 words with no problem (Windows, Linux, and Mac versions available).

Currently I have two Linux operating systems loaded on test machines. One is the new Xandros Home Edition Premium Version 4.0, and the other is Linspire 5.0. I'll ignore the wealth of audio and video features in both operating systems because we're looking at business applications. Both come with plenty of software (browser, e-mail, office suite etc.) free, unlike Microsoft XP which does not include Microsoft Office.

Xandros includes OpenOffice 2.0 while Linspire provides OpenOffice 1.1. Linspire provides a consistent look and feel across all of its programs, unlike Xandros which comes with the Firefox Web browser and Thunderbird e-mail client. Linspire's applications are based on code from Mozilla.org, makers of Firefox and Thunderbird, so the applications function the same on both systems.

I installed Ubuntu 6.06 Linux, based on good reports, but it couldn't handle the video board in my Compaq Pentium III system. Since every other Linux I've tried does work, I dumped Ubuntu. Yes, I searched the Web and found help for various fixes, but since Windows doesn't make you edit configuration files by hand, users won't put up with a Linux that forces you to do so. I'll try Ubuntu on another PC and tell you what happens.

Novell's SuSE Linux 10 gets great reviews and is aimed at businesses. I'll try that soon if Novell will still talk to me. I expect Xandros to upgrade its excellent Business Desktop 3.0 version soon, and I look forward to seeing that upgrade.

Three books deserve mention for the ABM crowd:

* First, Just Say NO to Microsoft by Tony Bove (No Starch Press, ISBN 1-59327-064-x) dives into the politics surrounding Microsoft and alternatives, but does offer an overview into Linux and Open Source Software alternatives to Microsoft.

James Gaskin writes books (16 so far), articles and jokes about technology and real life from his home office in the Dallas area.