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Want to use MS Office to open and save ODF spreadsheets, word processing, and presentation documents, but don’t want to wait until 2009 to do it?  Sun has got you covered.  Microsoft recently announced that native ODF support would be coming to its popular Office 2007 productivity suite with the release of Service Pack 2, currently scheduled for early to mid 2009.  Users who either can not or do not wish to wait that long have an alternative though, and it comes from one of Microsoft’s chief competitors in the market for office productivity software: Sun Microsystems.

Sun has taken the open source OpenOffice suite of productivity applications, and offers a branded version called StarOffice 8.  The productivity suite, which includes word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, drawing, and database capabilities (think Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio, and Access) costs far less than typical licenses for MS Office, and offers nearly the same functionality.  Major advantages include full compatibility with both ODF and popular MS Office formats, including .doc/.odt, .xls/.ods, and .ppt/.odp, as well as significant cost savings versus a typical installation of MS Office.

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