Wednesday, February 21, 2007

Microsoft Office Alternatives

Everyone needs Microsoft Word, right? If you're creating documents at work, writing term papers or just letters at home, you need to process words.

But Word, and especially Office, is so expensive. A quick look at Amazon.com shows a sticker price of a whopping $350. Ouch.

Thankfully you have options. OpenOffice is a free, open source suite of programs that lets you produce the same documents as Microsoft Office.

Writer (), Impress (), Math (), Draw (), Calc () and Base () are all included to produce text documents, presentations, mathematical functions, vectored drawings, spreadsheets and databases.

OpenOffice can run on Windows, Mac, Linux and a few other OSes, too. One thing to note though Mac users, OpenOffice requires an extra addon that can be a pain to install and run the suite. Luckily though, OpenOffice has a more useful cousin, NeoOffice, which is also free and contains the same programs, but is native to Mac OS X.

There are a other Microsoft Office alternatives, but none with as nice of a price as OpenOffice/NeoOffice.

2 comments:

J. Oosting said...

What about the new google docs and spreadsheets? Free, and you can access your docs anywhere on any computer. Or so I've heard. I haven't actually tried either product yet.

S Crespi said...

Hey,

I've tried google speardsheets. I was hoping to share with my coworkers so we could all be working on the same document from different time zones.

Unfortunately, the program allows you to upload Excel sheets but shares VERY few of the features you are used to using in Execl.

Sorry to bring the negative again.