Alternatives to Microsoft Office
You won’t hear any disagreement from me if you say Microsoft Office is good. It’s great, it has a vast amount of features and once upon-a-time most people seemed to have a copy of it. Not often legal ones, but you either had it or you didn’t.
Today Microsoft office is expensive. Amazon.co.uk has the Standard edition at £283.27 at time of writing. That’s a lot of money, especially if you don’t use it every day.
Here I have some credible alternatives to Microsoft office that are hassle-free and cost-free:
Open office org
Open Office.org (the ‘.org’ is included for legal reasons) is my personal favourite. Developed with help from Sun Microsystems, but still open source and completely free, Open Office.org offers you a seamless switch over from Microsoft Office. With alternatives to Microsoft Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Access, you’ll still be able to open regular Office documents, work on them save them and read and edit them again in Microsoft Office. Open Office hasn’t always been the quickest application, but it is becoming faster and more streamlined with each release.
IBM Lotus Symphony
Lotus is based on an earlier version of Open Office, but branched off in a slightly different direction. It’s not as intuitive as Open Office but it’s free and again works with Word documents.
Google Docs
Google is becoming a contender in many fields, but the one benefit to using Google Docs is the ability to keep your work in the cloud. Just sign up for a free account and you can write and edit documents and spreadsheets from any computer in the world.
The interface is more spartan, the options fewer – to get more, you’ll need to upgrade to a paid version – but it’s utterly usable.
You can also work live with other users on documents, making real-time revisions and updates by selecting which documents to share with which users.
In today’s varied internet ecology, paying for expensive products when you can get free, legal equivalents is just unnecessary.
