Question - Should cash strapped schools shell out big bucks to upgrade to M$ Office 2007?

Answer - No Way! Not with Open Office 3 as an alternative. Open Office 3 has all the features an average Joe needs to work with officey-type documents. Open Office is a complete office package including tools for creating text documents, presentations and spreadsheets. There’s even a pretty nifty drawing component. The new interface looks much nicer than Open Office 2. One of the hottest selling points for Open Office 3 is that is supports M$ Office 2007 documents. That means you don’t have to upgrade to Office 2007 to be able to use documents created with Office 2007.

“First Look at OpenOffice.org 3.0 Beta” by my favorite tech blogger - Adrian Kingsley-Hughes

When talking about digitized presentations, lots of people think the only way to get it done is with PowerPoint. However, there are some great non-powerpoint tools out there. Zoho Show and Google docs both offer free and easy to use web based presentation tools. A couple business oriented presentation tools are SlideRocket (in beta-stage, sign up for free) and KinetiCast (pay for product, 15 day free trial with limitations). For people who are creative and don’t fit in the plain Jane PowerPoint box, Voicethreads is definitely the way to go.

Need another free art tool? Look no further - Pencil looks like a great alternative for people tired of piddling around with MS Paint. Check out the gallery for some samples of what can be done with Pencil.

Pencil - Traditional Animation Software

The best thing about GIMP is all the cool plugins and addons out there. We’ve spent the last couple days learning to use GIMP and customizing the scripts and brushes. Still looking for cool pattern addons. The best two sites I’ve found recently are

Techzilo’s Brush Sets and
The Glinted Brush’s GIMP Beginner’s Guide

Help us collect good GIMP resources - post your finds in comments!

Eureka!! The GIMP runs smoothly from a flash drive. This means GIMP for my classes. Life is good! I have to be honest, I downloaded the GIMP a couple of releases ago and I was underwhelmed. It seemed clunky and difficult compared to Photoshop and Fireworks. Today I put some time in getting to know version 2.4.5. Not too shabby.

Check out The Gimp
Get right to business and download GIMP 2.4.5

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