View the March presentations
of Backups!
by Rob Limbaugh, Drew Kwashnak, and Richard Corzo |
DACS General Meeting
April, 2010
Meeting Review:
Microsoft Office Alternatives
by Patrick Libert
Jim Scheef’s excellent interactive presentation introduced us to several alternative programs to Microsoft’s Office software.
These “on line” (cloud) programs are:
Google Docs
If one can live with the premise that using any Google product probably harvests details about the user, the suite is a good source of basic Office components.
These are:
Documents (Word)
Spreadsheets (Excel)
Presentations (PowerPoint)
Gmail (Entourage)
Drawings – no Office equivalent
Forms – no Office equivalent
This program is the most basic of the aforementioned three and it requires a Google account for login.
Zoho Office
This online suite offers twenty-two different applications, each offering several options. Comparing to Microsoft Office, the four major ones are:
Zoho Writer (Word)
Zoho Sheet (Excel)
Zoho Show (PowerPoint)
Zoho Mail (Entourage)
There are six other productivity and collaboration apps as well as twelve different business apps.
Zoho Office is fancier, offers themes in the Zoho Show application and in many ways, is closer to PowerPoint than Google’s version.
Zoho is free for personal use with a 1GB storage limit, which is ample for most users.
ThinkFree Office
This suite has simple office applications which can be downloaded and used free for thirty days. After that time period, the cost if $49.95.
ThinkFree runs on Java which means that it is limited to machines having the latest Java application.
ThinkFree uses Office file formats so that no conversion is necessary between programs. It is so similar to MS Office that the learning curve is practically nonexistent.
Jim chose to illustrate each application by using a PowerPoint presentation to show how it is handled by the alternatives.
If one is interested in all other MSOffice alternatives, please refer to the March 2010 AskDACS document available at: http://www.dacs.org/archive/2010-03/ranotes.htm
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