“Free” has two meanings: (1) gratis, and (2) libertas. When I say free software, I mean libertas, although much free software is gratis, as well.

Choice

There are two parts to choice: (1) different software that does the same thing, and (2) the ability to modify software to do what you want.

Don’t like the way Word handles bulleted lists? Try OpenOffice.org. Or AbiWord. Or KOffice. Or . . .

There are many brilliant programmers developing free software, and you might like one better than what you are using now. For text documents, there are a ton of options, and most of them will open and edit your .doc files just like Word.

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I recently downloaded the trial version of Office 2007 for a long-term test, and I wanted to share my thoughts and reactions after living with it for about two weeks. I primarily use Outlook and Word, and Excel only occasionally. My comments will obviously focus on those programs.

I’ll start with my conclusion: Based on Outlook and Word, Office 2007 is probably not worth the upgrade. If you were hoping to do amazing new things, or that you would save tons of time because of new streamlining, this is not the office suite you are looking for. What Office 2007 does is fine-tune the interface, which is nice, but not really worth $239-679.

But I am going to get Office 2007 anyway. It took me a few days to come to this conclusion, but the new software takes some time to get used to. When you learn where things have gone and how to manipulate the new interface, it really does make more sense, and it really is easier to use. Still, this is a minor upgrade for the user, whatever Microsoft’s marketing division may say. (My IT friends say MS did a number from a systems perspective, but that doesn’t mean much to me.)

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