Alternatives to Standard Office Software Can Save Your Translation Business Money
“Put your money where your mouth is” is a cliché often used to describe the attitude required for starting a new business. In other words, the business owner has to be prepared to make initial investments in the business in order to reap the benefits later. While this is true, money can often be better spent in some areas than in others, of course. We in the translation industry are lucky that our work lends itself so well to streamlining. One way in which money can be saved, particularly in the crucial initial phase, is to look at alternatives to the standard office software.
The packages which have become the de facto standards – Word, Excel, PowerPoint – are regarded as a major, but unavoidable, cost. Major, yes: the fees for Windows and Microsoft Office can quickly add up to several hundred Euros per user. With Microsoft moving to subscription-based licensing, you are also faced with a further annual charge for the foreseeable future.
But unavoidable, no. Recent developments in the software industry are bringing about major changes. Sun Microsystems now offers StarOffice in a bid to take on the Microsoft monopoly. StarOffice is a complete replacement for Word, Excel and PowerPoint, and it is almost 100% Microsoft-compatible. For example, you can save text documents in .doc format, so that they can be handled in Word just like an original Word document. Your business partners will never know the difference. And the best news for small-business owners: StarOffice comes at a fraction of the cost of the standard office software.
StarOffice is itself the commercial version of the completely free OpenOffice. Like StarOffice, OpenOffice is a replacement of Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Being free, it has a few downsides: there is no technical support, and there are a few idiosyncrasies that take a bit of getting used to (though these are now even fewer with the latest version, 2.2), but this is a small sacrifice for a completely free word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation package. My favourite single component of OpenOffice is the completely convenient - and, I have to say it again, free - PDF converter, which I personally use for all my invoices.
How can a package like this be available for free? The answer is: open-source software development. In other words, the source code for OpenOffice is freely available and open for anyone to view and modify. The code itself comes from hundreds of volunteer software programmers and software companies around the globe, in a global programming project coordinated via the internet. These volunteers are simply individuals who are interested in contributing to a working, affordable alternative to the standard.
This openness has many advantages, not least better quality: even Microsoft's army of quality control engineers cannot compete with the multitude of volunteers (many of whom are experienced software professionals) who pounce on every bug in OpenOffice as soon as it appears.