Free Office Software

I was having a weird problem with MS Office locking up my computer for several minutes at a time when I tried to cut and paste. As I do this a lot, it was very irritating and I could find no solution, nor wished to spend the money on an upgrade that may or may not fix the problem. As I'm a consultant with a home office, this was critical.

I decided to uninstall MS Office and try Open Office. I was quite pleasantly surprised. 90% of the things I did in Word and Excel, I could do in OO without any thought. Some things were actually easier. The only thing that required help and testing was the way to do a spreadsheet mail merge onto Write labels - the menu arrangements are quite different but actually more logical in OO. A few minor tricks, like print selection in Calc to avoid printing all tabs, and I was up to speed. All of my spreadsheets, presentations and Docs were fine. To ensure automatic support, I set the suite to default to MS Office formats. (for now) I've had no complaints of anything I've sent out since.

I use OpenOffice from time to time and it's easy to use and I find it easy to swap between it and Microsoft Office programs. The downside and the reason I haven't swapped over to OO is that I can't use Endnote, the bibliography and referencing program I use for my research with OpenOffice Writer. A colleague emailed the Endnote people to ask about this and was told that in order for Endnote to work in OpenOfficeWriter, they would have to make their code available to be used in Open Source software and they weren't willing to do this for commercial reasons. I can understand why this is so, so I will continue to use Word so I can use this program. I suspect that the Endnote people are not the only ones who make this kind of commercial decision, so open source software may have limited value for specialist users.

At work, I'm using Microsoft Office 2000 with almost no complaints. It does what it is supposed to do. But lately, and it seems to happen more often, I receive documents from colleagues that cannot be opened or read anymore.

I have been able to solve all problems up to now by opening these documents in OO, and saving them back in MS Office format. One of the faulty documents was a very large Excel file that most of our users couldn't open - and if they could (2GB RAM), it was very slow. Opening in OO was amazingly fast and gave no problems whatsoever.

So yes, I'm convinced that I will use OO more and more, as I can also clearly see the benefits of its consistency in Writer, the ease of use and logic that I find missing in MS Office.

I have used all of the products mentioned here recently. None of them except the 'commercial' ones work seamlessly in Windows. This article missed 'Evolution', probably because it is not yet ready for mission critical work(on a Windows platform). 'Evolution' is ready for primetime on a linux platform. Right now there is not a complete replacemnt for Microsoft Office. I do believe in time there will be a complete open-source(free) replacement. The learning curve is to steep for the mass market at this time. All mentioned here(except the commercail(for a fee)) lack the integrated and critical 'Personal Information Manager'(PIM) like 'the old 'Daytimer' software... and what OUTLOOK can do now.

I didn't know about AbiWord and Jart but will give them a go and see if I like them. For yet another free alternative to the MS Office suite of products, I'd like to recommend TextPal from www.EmpowermentZone.com/palsetup.exe . This is not only a word processor, but it has a very nice feature which converts files with almost any extension into a clean text document. A host of other great features are included as well. TextPal was developed by Jamal Mazrui who is visually-impaired, and he has gone to great lengths to make it as accessible as possible. I'm still learning some of the features, but I must give TextPal an A-plus.

Don't forget about Thinkfree; that's another web-based suite that, in addition to Excel and Word doppelgangers, has a PowerPoint-type program as well. I can't speak for the spreadsheet and presentation programs as I've never used them, but the word processing program works very similarly to Word. I've had no formatting problems with shuttling materials between Word and Thinkfree (I use it as a backup for my writing). While there's no calendar function that I'm aware of, I'm sure they're working on it.

I use Abiword for most of my lite word processing. It loads fast and has a simple layout. Open Office is what I use for them heavy word processing, and spreadsheet jobs I do from time to time. Jarte runs on my old Win95 laptop that I keep around for some odd reason.

I use M$-Office but when I install systems for friends, I install OO.org. None of them have ever noticed the difference. M$ Office is much nicer and friendlier and probably worth the price if there weren't a free option available.

For the vast majority of users the advantages of M$ over OO are generally not worth the difference unless there is feature in M$-Office which is indispensible for you.

As for the learning curve. Switching from Office 2003 or lower to OO is much easier than switching to M$-Office 2007 which has a vastly "improved" interface. The biggest difference between OO and M$ is that M$ is more aesthetic or in mdern language is much sexier.

You must try "SSuite Office - The Fifth Element".

It is completely free for download, and is only 57 MB in size after installation. It also has more than 30 very useful applications.

Download page link: http://ssuite5element.webs.com/thefifthelement.htm

I use Open Ofice because my old CPU with MS office. I don't like OO very much, it is missing a lot of futures. Is there any others you recomend.