The application set that you use most often on your Windows machine is probably the office suite. With most people, this is Microsoft Office, though some prefer other not-so-well-known suites like the Corel WordPerfect Suite, or the Lotus Smartsuite.

So it hurts the most when MS Office crashes or freezes up. It breaks the rhythm of your work, disrupts your concentration and wastes valuable time while you restart the application (or, in extreme cases, restart Windows). What do you do to get rid of MS Office errors? Reinstallation is an option, but that works only if your existing installation has somehow become corrupted. And even in that case, it’ll only work until it becomes corrupted again.

Perhaps the best option for you is to try something different, something that has been built from the ground up on an entirely different code base, a solid and mature product that won’t cost you one cent to try out or even to switch over to entirely.

Enter OpenOffice.org. It sounds like a website, and it is a website – http://openoffice.org. But it is also an office suite, of the same name. OpenOffice.org differs from other office suites in a few major ways. First, it is free, as in free lunch. Yes, completely free – no strings attached and no adware, shareware or nagware business. It’s yours to download and use (from the website link given above).

Another difference is that OpenOffice.org is also free as in free speech. It is open source and Free Software (notice the capital F and S), which means that the source code of the program is also downloadable for free, and anyone who knows how to program can legally modify and redistribute it, as long as he/she passes on the same modification and redistribution rights to the recipients.

Enough about differences; now on to similarities. The user interface of OpenOffice.org is almost a clone of what Microsoft Office used to be, till very recently when Microsoft released version 2007. And for this very reason, people who are used to the Microsoft product should have little or no difficulty accomplishing the same task in OpenOffice.org. Perhaps they could even achieve greater productivity, because while most of the modules in it are at least as good as in the MS product, some modules are actually better. Stability-wise, too, it seems to be more solid and robust than its competitors, so what better way is there to get rid of those crashes, and for free too?

Now is a great time for you to take a serious look at OpenOffice.org. That’s because Microsoft’s office suite has recently undergone a complete change of user interface, done away with the traditional menus and introduced something called ribbons instead. Whether the new style is better or worse than before is a matter of debate. But on thing is for sure – office workers will have to learn their way around from scratch.

So if you want to upgrade your office applications to something more solid, dependable and familiar, think OpenOffice.org. It has everything where you expect them to be, and can read and write MS Office formats (doc, pps, xls and so forth) without the slightest hitch. What’s more, it can export its documents to the PDF format for convenient transfers, which is something MS Office lacked.

So go ahead and download it now, and get rid of your office productivity errors.