I’m absolutely astounded by the number of people who still insist on spending large sums of money to buy or upgrade the Microsoft Office suite for their computer. Why are you doing this? Sure, if you’re hamstrung by a stupid I.T. department or you work for a prehistoric government body, then you have no option, but the rest of you? Really? Srsly?

The latest greatest LibreOffice 4.0 is a glorious piece of free open source software, which works like a dream and comes with everything you need to get all those important document processing tasks done and more. The suite of programs includes stunningly capable word-processor, drawing, spreadsheet, presentation and database applications and most importantly it runs on Mac, Linux and PC effortlessly.

The programs make full use of open standards which makes it easy to move your documents around, and it copes with Microsoft formats like a champ. Sure, if you’ve got some manic 10 dimensional programmable MS Excel spreadsheet you’ll probably have problems, but for every one of those users, there’s a thousand who just store their weekly expenses.

In fact the program is that good that this is one time where we won’t even consider comparing it to Google Docs, as the functionality of the latter doesn’t hold a candle to LibreOffice. Anyway, this has been a public service message, and if you haven’t already gone off to download the suite, stop reading this and go do it.

It will take you a day or two to get used to the differences between the MS product and the new programs on your hard disk, but after that you’ll be free from upgrade charges for ever.