Exceptional Internet

Unless you work for a Microsoft competitor the chances are if you use an office suite at work then it will be a version of Microsoft Office, which has dominated the corporate market for many years. This dominance has been beneficial to the business world as it has enabled companies to exchange documents with each other without needing to worry about incompatible file formats.

Unfotunately this was not always the case with home users. Historically Microsoft Office was a heavy duty suite comprising many applications, some of which weren’t much use to the average home user who’s requirements probably extended to writing documents and maybe some home finances. Many PC manufacturers provided for this by bundling Microsoft Works, which on the surface was a cut down version of Office but unfortunately didn’t have a file format that was compatible with it’s grown up sibling.

This caused some frustration as home users who wished to take documents to the office then found that they wouldn’t open on their work PC’s, and the price for a full version of Microsoft Office put it out of reach of many home users.

Fortunately Microsoft have finally caught up with the home users requirements and released a cut down version of Office aimed at home users and students called the Home and Student Edition which contains the applications that are most useful to a home user (Word, Excel and Powepoint) for a more friendly price tag.

However before you spend any money on Microsoft Office (currently about £90 on Amazon) you may want to investigate some of the alternatives that are available for an even more attractive price…free!

To start with how about a full open source office suite featuring all the tools available in the full version of Microsoft Office? Well OpenOffice.org is just such an application (or suite of applications to be pedantic) featuring a word processor, spreadsheet application, presentation tool, database application and drawing application it covers all the bases and is compatible with all the major office suites so that a document you create in Open Office can be opened in Microsoft Word and vice-versa.

The interface is intuitive enough to feel comfortable for average Microsoft Office users and has some useful extra features such as the ability to export to the popular .pdf format.

And if you are concerned about the level of support a free application like Open Office might have you can rest easy. The project was created by Sun and is also backed by IBM, 2 of Microsoft’s biggest competitors in the corporate market.

Here at Exceptional Internet OpenOffice.org has rapidly become our productivity suite of choice, easily fulfilling our requirements. But don’t just take our word for it, why not download a copy today.

But there is another alternative that may be worth your time. It’s also free, backed by a huge corporation, will export documents in popular formats including Microsoft Office, and this one doesn’t even require a lengthy download before you can use it.

That’s right, the mighty Google has created an online productivity “suite” called Google Docs and Spreadsheets. This gives you a couple of basic applications that run in a web browser and handle (as the name suggests) documents and spreadsheets. These aren’t as fully featured as Micorsoft Office or OpenOffice.org but are powerful enough for most common uses.

As they are web based Google’s suite also has some nice integrated collaboration support, allowing you to work with others on your documents. You can investigate further by heading over to Google.

There are of course other alternatives available such as Corel Word Perfect, but for our money the three suites above offer all you need for your office and productivity requirements.

Filed under: Software