Friday Finds for 04/25/2008: Other Office Alternatives
This week I’ve been writing about Microsoft’s dominance of the realm of word processing, spreadsheets, and presentation graphics — the office suite. In my opinion OpenOffice remains the best alternative to the Microsoft application trio because OpenOffice is free, has most of the same features as Office, and can read and write all the proprietary Microsoft Office formats. If, however, you’re not sold on OpenOffice, there are a few other alternatives; however, most are not free and don’t come as nicely packaged as OpenOffice.
I had a very hard time finding a free solution similar to OpenOffice. Individual applications to replace one or more of the standard Office offerings do exist. For example, you could replace Microsoft Word with AbiWord; however, the proprietary .doc format has limited support. What I did find was a fairly decent office suite roundup by PC Magazine.
Take the reviews in the PC Magazine article with a grain of salt. Product reviews found in traditional print media are often watered down and slightly bias. Magazines make their money from advertising revenue. Therefore, their reviews walk a fine line between total honesty and “biting the hand that feeds them.” I might seem overly skeptical but trust me, I’ve written reviews for similar publications in the past and when my review was negative it was either heavily “edited” or the last article I ever wrote for that publication.
If you’re interesting and seeing what other Office alternatives exist, check out the PC Magazine article from November 2007.
Share, Bookmark, or Email this post
|
|
If you liked this post, subscribe to TechTraction's RSS feed or TechTraction's email feed
Filed under: Friday Finds
Now there are many online version of office apps. Checkout Google Docs and Zoho.com
Yeah, the online options are making significant headway in this area of computer; however, call me “old school” but I still prefer locally installed applications.
Thanks for the comment
I’m not sure what you mean by “however, the proprietary .doc format has limited support” - AbiWord can import nearly every doc file, and if you’ve found one that has issues, please file a bug at http://bugzilla.abisource.com and attach the file so that we can fix it. Please let me know if you have any issues, or better yet, file a report.
Thanks!
Ryan
AbiWord dev, Windows maintainer
I’m going by what the AbiWord FAQs clearly state in regards to whether they can read and write Word documents (see below):
“Presently, can open most Microsoft Word documents well. For further information and a few “quid pro quos”, please continue reading.
Caveat
However, if the document has complicated tables, text boxes, embedded spreadsheets, and so forth, then it might not work as expected. Developing good MS Word filters is a very difficult process, so please bear with us as we work on getting Word documents to open correctly. If you have a Word document which fails to load, please open a Bug and include the document so we can improve the importer. “