Alternatives to Microsoft Office


After a snowed-out January General Meeting, Jim Scheef, former DACS president, conducted his January presentation at our February 7 meeting. For those who are looking to find a less expensive—and compatible—alternative to Microsoft Office, the two products that Jim described could hit the spot.

One of the products is currently available and the other was just released from beta test. One runs on your own computer, just like Office, and one is Web-based, using Java and your browser.

OpenOffice.org
OpenOffice.org 2.0 is an open source product that runs on your computer and offers almost all the components that Microsoft Office provides but under different names. For example:

Base is the database component compatible with Access.

Calc is the spreadsheet akin to Excel.

Impress has the functions of PowerPoint.

Writer performs the functions of Word.

In addition, the package contains several other components such as Draw (a simple art program) and Math (a formula editor). These programs provide the functions of Office and can read and create compatible Office files. They are easy to use and fluidly interoperable with every major office suite.

One major current weakness is the depth of its help function. But, hopefully, that will improve over time. It’s a smooth installation, although a large download (76 MB)—and it’s free.

ThinkFree Office Online

This new set of Office-compatible tools was just released from beta and is network-based. In other words it performs its functions through a web browser, and can therefore be accessed from any Windows computer. It’s been tested on Windows 2000/XP and IE, and will eventually be supported on Linux, Mac, Firefox and Safari.

It is the beginning of a new set of products that are now being introduced by many companies that run on servers instead of your computer. Even Microsoft is working on an online version of Office.

ThinkFree Office Online will be free to use, but is going to be advertising supported. It also is equivalent to the company’s $49.95 downloadable ThinkFree Office Suite 3 product.

It has three components:

Write is Word compatible.

Calc is its spreadsheet program, equivalent to Excel.

Show is the same as PowerPoint

Installation is easy—just open the Web site. Load and save files to Web folders or locally. Since it is Web-based using a dial-up connection is not advisable.

Think you can’t open Office documents without paying hundreds of dollars for software? Think again. Just visit ThinkFree Office Online and you can open, edit, and create Office documents with this easy and convenient online service.

With ThinkFree Office Online, you can also post documents directly to your blog without any conversion and convert your existing documents to PDF format

For those interested in a compatible alternative to the very expensive Microsoft Office line of products these two are possibilities. They are still a little rough around the edges but could easily provide the user with everything they need.
Are they for you? It depends on what you need. For the average user, unafraid of a short learning curve, the answer is yes. But if you are working with companies that use Office products that depend on 100% guaranteed compatibility, you may want to think twice at this point.


 
 
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