“There are alternatives to the ubiquitous applications suite, but in most cases, they’re not worth the trouble. Do you need to have Microsoft Office on your PC? Because Word, Excel, and PowerPoint have become the de facto standards for word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations, it’s tough to do any sort of business on a computer without being able to read and edit files in those formats. But if you’re willing to make some compromises, there are alternatives.” Read the rest of the editorial at BusinessWeek. In a related note, Gobe released a new demo of gobeProductive3.
Is There Life Outside Microsoft Office?
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
I have been trying to use StarOffice 6 instead of MS Office for about a month now. I have had some visually ugly problems with line thinkness in my company’s Excel spreadsheets, but it’s been pretty successful other than that. In particular, it has handled just about everything Word has thrown at it. (I don’t use PowerPoint as a rule.)
Even though the author is apparently using StartOffice 5, he is right that the dialogs asking you to save your documents in StarOffice format are a little annoying. But that’s OK – it just reminds me that I’m taking a step in the right direction. ;^)
The author makes good points, but comes at them from an obtuse angle. He seems to have been looking for alternative office suites that open and save MS Office documents. How “alternative” is that? It’s no big surprise that he comes to teh conclusion that “there really is no substitute for Office itself.”
I read an excellent article (I think at OSOpinion) that argued that rather than trying to make open source office suites conform to MS’s closed and ever-changing file format standards, why doesn’t the open source community focus on proliferating a new, open standard?
I realize that the author is coming from the business community rather than the technical side, but writing a review of an office suite that is based solely on how well it opens and MS Office documents isn’t exactly representative of the overall quality of the software.
I like using Gnumeric under Linux. For “home use”, it does more than one would ever need. For some basic business uses, it’s pretty good, too. Gnumeric offers virtually all of the same functions and features of Excel. However, once you get into some really hot and heavy financial analysis, Excel wins out. It has nothing to do with file formats, either…just a matter of functions and features.
that file format compatability with Office is a must. Developing a new and open standard is fine, but if you want to be able to send someone a spreadsheet and not have your recipent (who might be paying you for your work) run into trouble opening it, then conforming to a common format is important.
conforming to a common format is important.
Which is exactly why the format should be open to everyone, rather than being owned by a single entity who can change it at will. The lock that MS has on the world’s information exchange MUST be broken, or else we will all continue paying them homage (read: $$$).
I agree with both Christopher and Rude. The real goal is to free ourselves from Microsoft’s domination (i.e. file format). The only question is how to get from here to there.
Rude’s point that you must be able to transfer files with the MS-controlled majority in order to get market share is correct. Once there is a legitimate competitor (or several), it will be possible to innovate again.
In essence, this is using Microsoft’s own strategy against them. What should we call it? “Embrace and liberate”? ;^)
Yep, there is life outside of office. Atlease for home users. I am perfectly happy with Gope Productive, well, improved Word support would be nice, but for 99% of things Gobe is great…
gnumeric looks great with some finishments will be perfect ,Evolution is quite handy for ex-Outlook user, staroffice 6 may be a good step too,
what about recent abiword releases? Do they take steps over bonobo integration?
http://www.thinkfree.com
http://www.ability.com
http://www.gobe.com
http://www.corel.com
http://www.notes.net
Trying to move out of Microsoft Office I’ve had some problems with Corel WordPerfect (slow and unstable on my whistler). I’m currently trying WinAbility (it’s a comparatively small and very complete package), looking foward to try also staroffice and thinkfree.
The lack of an open workable standard for office documents is a real pain. RTFs
are of no use for me, I can only think of html and pdf as the nearest choice.
Am I missing some big office suite?
http://www.thinkfree.com
http://www.ability.com
http://www.gobe.com
http://www.corel.com
http://www.notes.net
http://www.openoffice.org
http://www.software602.com
http://www.textease.com
http://www.vistasource.com
woa, searching the net for office suites I found the Andrew User Interface System and its EZ – As a Word Processor (As published in the Linux Journal, August, 1994). I had forgotten those black&white apps (http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~AUIS/ljdocs/ez-wp/welcome.html).
Is to build an Office Suite that runs on everything seamlessly and costs less then MS Office, then you will see a shift in thinking. I don’t think that the world should be compatible with Windows PCs, but Windows PCs should be compatible with the world, or you could take the Linux folks approach and it goes like this “send it to me in RTF, or don’t send it at all!”, that is what our Lead Software Engineer (Linux Guru) motto is! Or do what Apple has proposed within Mac OS X, you can just save it in a PDF format and anyone should be able to look at it with whatever PDF viewer they have, which is better if it is only for viewing anyways!
I’m totally disappointed with Gobe Productive. I got one copy for the introductory price and the CD sent via ground mail was scratched,
broken and unusable. I emailed them four times via their web site “support”
but they didn’t answer a single line just to say “Sorry there is nothing to do”.
Not a good way to start and win a reputation against Microsoft Office.
>>>I don’t think that the world should be compatible with Windows PCs, but Windows PCs should be compatible with the world, or you could take the Linux folks approach and it goes like this “send it to me in RTF, or don’t send it at all!”, that is what our Lead Software Engineer (Linux Guru) motto is!
That’s not how the world works. Your customers are always right — so when your customers send you a MSWord file, you don’t tell your customers to send you a RTF one.
I don’t know what happened with your support e-mail, however, I will look into it immediatly.
If you copy me on the e-mail, I will make sure you get a new CD via overnight mail.
Sorry for the trouble.
Best regards,
Bruce Hammond
Gobe Software, President/CEO
OK Bruce I don’t really need the Windows copy right now. You will send it me with the Linux copy I have already sent back the coupon for which is the one I’m really interested in. My name is Carlo Fresia anyway and I have registered the product twice with the serial number via web. Let me only know if my name is unknown in your Productive 3.0 database and I will try another email and another registration.
Best regards.
Carlo Fresia
>>That’s not how the world works. Your customers are always right — so when your customers send you a MSWord file, you don’t tell your customers to send you a RTF one.<<
You obviously haven’t lived in Europe?! (no pun intended)
And I was talking about more about internally within your company sending files back and forth between coworkers, I work in a diverse environment of OSes, though we do use Windows NT for the administrative tasks and the other OSes for everything else (the real work)!
The article shows that the suits, while not being opened-minded enough to accept any file format except Microsoft’s, are open-minded enough to consider the existance of non-Microsoft software.
This is a much better situtation than what we had six years ago.
– Sam
Looks like I’m the only one here that really likes MS Office. Even if all alternatives were free I wouldn’t bother.
MS Office is a damn impressive piece of software. It’s not bloated and slow as many would like us to believe, on the contrary, I think it’s very fast. Opening Word 2002 on my lowly P3 450MHz takes 2 seconds. When I close it and open it again, it starts without delay.
As for size, installing Office XP Standard takes about 350MB disk space. Considering all the features, this is very reasonable. Install a game today and you loose anything from 300MB-3GB (running from CD is not fun).
Every Windows user I know (that is actually == all computer users I know) have Office. If they don’t they have friends that have it. I don’t think many/any of them have payed $329 for their Professional edition.
For me, sharing .doc-files is hardly a problem, although I would like the file format to be open.
danlu, I have a copy of MS-OfficePro97 and I sure like it. But I feel NO need to update it and give em the cash with an Office suite like OpenOffice.org
Check out that suite, it has about everything you may need, it’s neat, very neat, very configurable, that’s more impressive for a minimal 100MB installation. And OPEN and Free. StarOffice scores high also.
Yes, you can get the latest MS Office for free if you have a fast conection, pirated of course, that may make it for home use (only a civil wrong), but not good at all for business use (CRIME, may end up costing you more than $1000…).
All computer users you would have known 10 years ago may had been using DOS, and Lotus, and WordStar, and …change happens. Prepare to say bye to “all users MS Office”, unless they dump it for free, or make it a looooot cheaper, and open it. Very unlikely.
Meanwhile, consider downloading MS Office XP perfect companion:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/23830.html
I see some Gnumeric users taking part in the discussion here. Since this thread is about “Life Outside Microsoft Office” please feel free to tell us (or at least me, and through me the Gnumeric team) of any specific problems, or missing features that made Gnumeric fall short of the mark for you compared with Excel.
[You can do the same about other alternatives of course, but it can’t be certain that all the other products are represented here.]
Guppi needs developement and doesn’t compile the latest guile, gnumeric is quite fine in itself