Proactive Services fully supports OpenOffice.org, the free office suite. Compatible with other major office suites, the product is free to download, use, and distribute. It is open source, meaning the code which makes it work is freely available and as of August 2005 has clocked up 46,100,000 downloads. It is made up of a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation creator and HTML editor. The coming version 2.0 will also include a database program.
OpenOffice.org is used exclusively by Proactive Services for correspondence, including invoices, stationery, book-keeping, reports and advertisements and I have experience with the suite since before its beta (initial development) stages. To give back to the project I help maintain the Consultants Directory where businesses that support OpenOffice.org are listed for potential customers to contact.
The suite's native document format is open in that the structure of saved files is documented specifically so others can use it, rather than many other suites which have closed formats that can lock a user with a specific software vendor, making reading documents in the future difficult.
It supports reading and saving in Microsoft® Office format, as well as Adobe PDF which most computers can read, keeping your options open and helping interoperability with others.
OpenOffice.org does not integrate deeply into the Windows® operating system, which is known to cause all manner of problems and clashes with rival products, and because of this is a very stable and reliable program. Another positive side effect of this "clean installation" is that it has only had one reported security issue, with maliciously created Microsoft®f Word files, and I know of no reports of this being exploited.
As well as installation and support I provide services for creating template documents including letterheads, spreadsheet invoices, time sheets and complex reports with varying depths of paragraph numbering and automatic text formatting - get the program to do the work for you!
I can also help create and maintain a proper filing system to keep your documents tidy and easy to find.
8th October 2005
