www.openoffice.org

Slowly but surely, I am freeing myself from his evil grasp. That's right, folks, one day I may not even recognize this man anymore. Today, I took another step away from Bill Gates and Microsoft, and maybe you should too.

How did he do it? Well, he had a damn good software suite. Everyone started using Windows. And then he struck, because now EVERYONE just HAD to have Windows, then Windows XP, or they felt as though they were in the stone age. And if you didn't have MS Office, you wouldn't be able to be functional in society. Thankfully, some people got pissed off about that and decided to make the world "better," instead of just "more Miscrosoft."

For me, it started with Gmail. I used it for a few days and was hooked. Yahoo has a decent webmail service too. I can't even stand Hotmail anymore. It is absolutely terrible. But it is the one that everyone heard about first, so they all still have their same horrible hotmail account with the name they came up with 8 years ago, if for no other reason than because they are afraid to change. After using Gmail, you too would realize how bad Hotmail is. I think I would rather go without email than use Hotmail again. Gmail has more storage, more sensible layout, a mailbox search function, and the best invention yet in email - linked conversations. There is even a chat function from right within the inbox. Hotmail has nothing.

Next, Internet Explorer got the boot. Mozilla Firefox, despite its annoying habit of not playing embedded .wmv files (or whatever those video files are), is far easier to use. Extensions, tabs, popup control and adblocking - all sorts of things that make it far superior. And, of course, the fact that - despite some recent problems - its security is still far better than that of Explorer is also a good thing. There is also an email program that works with Firefox called Thunderbird, but I have not yet tried it.

Today I took the next step. The omnipresent MS Office would be the next to go. Computers rarely come equipped with eveything Office, such as Excel, Powerpoint and Word. Rather, they have Notepad, which isn't very good for making presentations or spreadsheets. If you want to buy the newest and best MS Office, it would cost you about $300. If you decide instead that you have had enough of Microsoft taking all your money and/or controlling your life, yet still want to be compatible with your work and collegues who are slaves of Microsoft, then GO TO OPENOFFICE.ORG and download Openoffice. This program contains everything you need (and even stuff you don't - if you're not a math nerd and can find a use for OO Math, you're a smarter man than I). You can open all previous Office documents including Powerpoint, Excel, and Word. You can build spreadsheets and databases. Best of all, you can even save your documents in Office format to ensure their compatibility with the computers of your stone-age slave friends and companies.

I have tried Word and Powerpoint documents, and they turned out perfectly in the new programs. There was a slight difference in the presentation of an Excel spreadsheet, but that was only in the presentation of a graph (the data remained identical).

So get to it. Download Openoffice. And bring us one small step closer to bankrupting Bill Gates.