So long as there is lots of great free software available (you might be surprised at how much of it there is and how good it is), being a student or not having much money is a very lame excuse for getting involved in illegal (pirate) software. With good, free software, you can do just about everything you want to do and not have to worry about getting caught and having to pay huge fines.
In our course, as you know, we use Microsoft Office, for which the TDSB has paid all the required licensing fees. It's very expensive. Luckily, as individuals we can get free copies of OpenOffice (www.openoffice.org/),
which works just as well as Microsoft Office. It - includes the equivalent of Word, Excel, Access and Powerpoint
- also includes a math component and a drawing program
- includes templates and clipart ("gallery")
- can open/save in the MS Office file formats
- can save in PDF format
- it is supported by the giant software corporation, Sun, and has lot of documentation, tutorials and so on - one good starting point is OpenOffice.org's wiki
- there is a version for just about every platform: Microsoft Windows (98 - Vista), GNU/Linux ("Linux"), Sun Solaris, Mac OS X (under X11), and FreeBSD
Screenshots (http://www.openoffice.org/screenshots/) give you an idea of the program
One goal in this unit is to give you an idea of the huge variety of great software you can download legally and for free. Just to get a quick look at a selection of the kind of applications available, browse the list at http://www.opensourcewindows.org/, "a simple list of the best free and open source software for Windows."
