Saving Money

If someone came to me today and said they were looking for a way to save their company money, my response would be to ditch Microsoft Office and move to OpenOffice.org. Unfortunately there would be no immediate savings because most companies have already made that purchase. However if someone was starting a company or new group, they could save a lot of start-up costs by going with OpenOffice.org instead of Microsoft Office.

A good question to ask is: "How much money will it save my company?" That is an excellent question that needs a bit of a background.

OpenOffice.org is free. Microsoft Office comes in four different flavors, each with a different price. Unfortunately a commercial company cannot use the "Home and Student" edition which only costs $149.99. The next lowest cost version comes in at $399.95 and is the "Standard" edition. This version also comes with Outlook which is Microsoft's e-mail client. If your company has standardized on Outlook for your e-mail, then there is a whole other area where you can save money but outside the scope of this discussion. The "Small Office" and "Professional" versions are $50 and $100 more, respectively. They both include Publisher and the Professional version includes the Access database.

The latest version of OpenOffice.org actually compares to the Microsoft Office Professional version in that it contains most of the features included in Publisher and Access. The only missing piece is Outlook, but that functionality can be replaced with Thunderbird which is a free e-mail client from the people that brought you the Firefox web browser. However my experience is that most employees really only use the features found in the Standard edition of office and so we will use $399.95 as the standard cost savings.

Once you have purchased Microsoft Office, you can use it forever. However, some people feel it necessary to upgrade to the latest version. When Microsoft switched from the ubiquitous .DOC file format to the .DOCX, they provided a conversion utility so you didn't have to upgrade. A lot of people still did and that cost them $239.95. That still seems like a lot of money especially during these trying economic times.

One feature I use extensively in OpenOffice.org is the ability to create PDF files. This is not something that comes with the Standard version of Office but is part of Publisher. The nice thing about PDF documents is that nobody can modify them once you send them out. Also since the Acrobat reader from Adobe is free on all platforms, almost all computers can read PDF files. There is no need to worry about recipients having the "correct" version of software to read your document.

So let's assume you work for a company with 100 employees and almost everyone already has a purchased copy of Microsoft Office. The next time a new version of Office is released by Microsoft, you will save your company roughly $24,000 by switching to OpenOffice.org.

Let's assume you have decided to branch out on your own and start a company. You may only have 5 employees but will save yourself $2,000 in start-up costs. That is a significant amount of money if you are bootstrapping the company yourself.

Now let's assume that you work for a company that has 100 employees but only have purchased a single copy of Microsoft Office. All it takes is one honest employee to find out that you are stealing software. You will then be forced to buy $40,000 worth of licenses plus another $60,000 in punitive damages. OpenOffice.org should look pretty cheap for anyone in this scenario.