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 My prime choice is - without doubt - OpenOffice.org 3. The basics of office document creation are well covered with an excellent module for each; word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, a desktop database, and some other gimmicks are all well worth exploring. All of the modules are easy to learn and if you've ever used any other office software, it's a doddle. It is extendable via extensions and handles all the same document types and you'll have no problem exchanging documents with MS Office.
OpenOffice in available in various 'flavors'. Sun Microsystems offers an almost identical StarOffice, IBM calls it Symphony, and there's also OxygenOffice with a lot of extras I don't really need.
A big plus is that it is available in many languages, but the most astounding fact is that even if you have thousands of employees and PCs, the cost is always the same - zero! Even for business use.
 If you're not in need of a full blown office suite and just want to write, you're fine with AbiWord. It's also a multi platform application, reads many standard document types (OpenOffice, MS Word, WordPerfect, RTF, HTML...) and you will be pleased with it's layout capabilities. As the program is very small, it requires very little resources and can blithely be used on even older machines. Of course, it is extendable via plugins and thus a perfect choice if your heart belongs to writing!
 Jarte, (see also this review) a fresh light weight, truly novel in design, is showing in the field of word processors. I've been using it for a while now, and there's nothing much I could wish for. It comes up in lightning speed, serves with all the necessary features plus an integrated screen grabber, which is very useful for writing how-to's on the fly. Some solutions are as simple as clever, e.g. when you mark a word and click the 'Encyclopedia' button, Jarte looks that word up in the Wikipedia. Correspondingly 'Dictionairy' and 'Thesaurus' take you online. The freeware version is a very respectable program, personally I use it as stand by word processor designed rather for short texts as I found no way of defining format styles - an essential feature (for me) when working on large documents.
 Gnumeric -The Gnome Office Spreadsheet is an excellent alternative to commercial products. It has been recommended over MS Excel for precision and stability, shines with "519 functions for use in spreadsheets. 154 of these are unique to Gnumeric", an online tutorial plus manual. Again, there are a lot of formats the program can process, so don't be shy and give it a try.
This software category is maintained by Christoph. Registered site visitors can contact Christoph (cy) by clicking here.
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Under "Gnumeric" christoph wrote "higher lurning curve for specific functions".
Could somebody correct this?
Fixed - thanks for pointing it out. He's reviewing spell checkers next time!
You should try the latest version 2.1 of "SSuite Office - The Fifth Element" that has recently been released.
It does not need to run on Java or .NET. It also has over 30 very useful applications included, and runs on any Windows system.
Page Link:
http://ssuite5element.webs.com/thefifthelement.htm or
http://www.ssuitesoft.com
BeBob Esq.
My two pieces of freeware will quickly open Word and 2007 format files. They're here: http://www.godskingsandheroes.info/software. They are supposed to be used for salvaging data, but can also work as somewhat light no install unformatted data viewers of docx and xlsx files.
Dear Christoph,
Can you please add a bit more "absolutely crucial" information to your reviews on behalf of the UK speaking world.
Is there an English/English version for OpenOffice.org.3 and for other programs you also reviewed? There appears to be no English/UK add-in on the OpenOffice site.
If there is none, or no add-ins, the rating for OpenOffice.org.3 MUST be lowered to no more than 3.5 stars. OK, so it is 5/5 for US speaking world, and 2/5 for UK speaking world as the program is useless for creating UK resume's, English tutoring or legal documents.
Could you please update your review.
Thank you
First up I'm very pro Open Office and all the amazing work done by Sun for putting out a great piece of code, and for nix at that.
I have to agree with Scoffer that all the suites based on OpenOffice code need a serious lowering of their rating, but not for the reason Scoffer gives.
The main reasons for choosing an Open Office based product is primarily you're a "Anything but Microsft" supporter, or are loathed to shell out several hundreds of dollars (and to keep the Europeans contingent happy Pounds/Euros) for a product suite of which you will never use 95% of its features.
Unfortunately the world is Microsoft centric, so Office compatibility in alternative suites is an absolute must. With this regard Open Office fairs very poorly as I've found out to my great cost.
To explain. About three months ago I was unfortunately retrenched at very short notice from my employment, and had to put together my resume. Due to having lost access to the use of Microsoft Word as I had to give back my company laptop, I downloaded Open Office 3.x and went to work, coming up with what I thought was a pretty good resume.
As those who have trawled the job sites, when you submit your resume ".DOC" format is the one and only format acceoted accross the board, with very few exceptions. So I started submitting my resume for available positions.
For thr first two months I didn't receive a single bite from any of my applications. It wasn't until I forwarded my resume to a potential employer via a friend that I found out why. The feed back was that my resume was a jumbled up mess.
On further investigation, Open Office's export to ".DOC" feature had realigned everything and my 5 page resume ended up as a 23 page document for use in the smallest room in the house. What a waste of two months jobsearching and all the related stress.
Within 2-3 days of correcting this issue, the e-mails and phone calls started flowing in.
Now if this isn't a serious failing which requires a radical drop in rating for the Open Office based suites I don't know what is. At best because of such issues a 3 or 3.5 would be a fair representation of where Open Office is at this time.
If you insist on using Open Office based suites, and you have the necessity to submit important documents in ".DOC" format as I did, check the final document before submitting it with one of the free viewers for Microsoft's products which are freely available.
And for all those who align themselves with Scoffer, I'm there with you. COLOUR has a "U" in it, and what's so hard to understand with metric?
hey people! Kingsoft Office 2007 has been released as a add supported freeware. it is compatible fully compatible with microsoft office 2003.
you can get the software from here:
http://phanmem.dec.vn/ProductDetails.aspx?ProductID=23
and get a complete description from here:
http://www.mydigitallife.info/2008/07/14/kingsoft-office-2007-personal-e...
Marcel Oros
Timisoara, Romania
Is there a portable version?
muCommander, a cross-platform file manager
http://www.mucommander.com/
I was initially very please with Softmaker's Textmaker wp program. Loads of features and the promise of full compatibility. But I have had it now for a little over a week and am finding it almost unusable. It crashes. I lose work. and it is not opening all my Word documents or jarte ones.
I cannot give it a recommendation at this point.
Open Office is badly let down by calc's charting facility. It is nowhere near as good as Excel (even in it's Office 97 version) and only barely compatible in that area.
The Open Office suite is bloated and you have to change most of the keystrokes which are non-standard.
Hello my friends!!!
Im using open office and im very happy with it!!!
I install it also to my mothers laptop because she need it for her work but unfortunately this laptop is old (512 ram - intel single core 1.4, win xp home) and the open office is making 1 minute to load a microsoft word/excell document!!
Please recommend an alternative :)
thank you very much!!!
*** she needs only word/excell support and she need only the veeeeery basics of that applications !
Hi Lambas,
If it is just Word and Excel that she uses, why not let her try Softmaker 2006? You can find it at the link below. Made of just 2 applications, An MS Word compatible word processor and MS excel compatible spreadsheet application. It is really small (24 MB download),light and the interface is similar MS Office 2003 , and totally free. Take a look, maybe you will find it adequate?
http://www.softmakeroffice.com/
To avoid any confusion, note that SoftMaker Office 2006 is completely free, the new version SoftMaker Office 2008 is not. You can find more information in the link I have posted. I can vouch for their good quality, I had used a public beta version of 2008 last year. Keep in mind, this does not have support for the new docx and xlsx formats though.
Another option for your Mum would be to download and use Abiword and Gnumeric separately, described in the article above.
Open office is said to be slow as it uses Java, you can disable that option, if I remember correctly, just google for the solution, but I feel the options I have posted maybe more suitable.
Hope this helps.
Cheers.:)
Hi nes!!!
I have no words to thank you!!! thanks x1000!!!
the word and excel documents open in half a second now (with Softmaker )! my mother is so excited haha!!!
Except that it is very simple too and has a beautiful gui like you said!
She wanted also to be able to view power point files (to view only) and i install the free microsoft viewer so now she is complete!!!
thanks once again my friend!!!
You are very welcome, Lambas. :) Glad to know you and your mum are so thrilled with it. We are all out to help each other, so pitch in too if you have any freeware suggestions. Cheers and take care.
What about "Atlantis Nova"?
Atlantis Nova is very fast, compact, and has a very small memory footprint.
It can be downloaded from here:
http://www.atlantiswordprocessor.com/en/nova.htm
Atlantis Nova has been a fine piece of freeware in 2001. It has not been updated since. The alternative as a word processor would now be AbiWord or JARTE.
kostenlose programme
You should try the new version of "SSuite Office - The Fifth Element".
It is very stable and fast, as it was written in WIN32. The new version 2.0 can export documents to pdf, png, emf, bmp, jpg, and gif. It is able to run on any Windows platform, from Win95 upto Win7 and beyond.The office suite consists of over 30 applications and is only 36.6 MB in size.
Download Links are:
http://www.ssuitesoft.com/index.htm
http://ssuite5element.webs.com/thefifthelement.htm
I have been using OpenOffice for years and have the same problem: it is very slow to load and it crashes daily. I keep upgrading hoping these two problems would be solved. I have also tried the other free variations (e.g., Go-OO), but with no difference.
I just received my new Asus EEE 1000HE, which has StarOffice 8 installed, and it is perfect: few freeze-ups and opens as fast as the Office '07 on my work PC. I am very pleased and will stop upgrading now that I have found one I like. (I still use Jarte for light duty work -- I love it too.)
Interestingly, I tried OpenOffice 3.x on the Asus and had the same problems I have always had. Can anyone explain why StarOffice rocks and OpenOffice is a sluggard?
Can I ask a question. I have the 1000he also and it came with
the StarOffice 8 also. We use MS Office 2007 not because its
so great but it links files and data with MS Office. How do you
change the default from star to office for opening files.
Chas.
Funny, for me, both StarOffice and OpenOffice were perfectly stable, and seemed very similar when I used them...
et brocklesby
I am certainly interested in any one of these freebies. I currently have off2003 with front page and today it comes up after 4 years of use with updates that It is a pirate copy, I know that this is not the case and it is a legitimate copy, Microsft is a bit of a bumber with all of this.
They also say that the updates will be stopped in a short while. I will certainly not be paying megga bucks for office 2007. I will uninstall and install one of the others. IBM looks the best bet. I also have office 2000 which is a genuine copy but it is way out of date.
Do you think it is a good idea to ditch office 2003 and install one of the others. I have 1.5 gigs of ram
Advice would be appreciated
eriv
Do you actually need all of Office ? or perhaps just a "word processor". You might want to try playing with Jarte.
et brocklesby
Thanks for comments that have been mentioned they are very useful and I will certainly work around all of them and see which is best and what will work with office 2003
No I need a complete office suite. I construct posters, tickets, fliers, recipes etc,etc. I reproduce photos for posters and recipes so I do need a comprehensive suite.
Do you actually have to share files with anyone?
Microsoft Works can sometimes be found for free and might be enough for your needs.
A rather wild suggestion is Cardfile:
http://www.techsupportalert.com/node/201
It's great for recipes (you can dl collections) and you can use it for free for a long period. It has excellent export facilities.
et brocklesby
Yes I do have to share files from time to time for costing purposes. I do have microsoft works 7 which I uninstalled when I installed office 2003 with front page. I am thinking of uninstalling office 2003 but I would like to keep XL and WORD, If i do install one of the freebies, or reinstall microsoft works 7.
reading the comments on Cardfile it appears people are very impressed with it.
what do you think
eric
I think you should try AZZ Cardfile. It's free, small, instantly available, and has endless uses. If you don't like it, it uninstalls perfectly.
And at least you could dl some recipe collections and get some ideas!
My experience with the latest version of IBM Lotus Symphony: Windows XP with all outstanding service applied - installation crashed with weird error message - uninstalled. Windows 2000 SP4 + all outstanding service: Same problem as with XP - uninstalled. Friends of mine who work at IBM tell me it's IBM's corporate strategy to replace all MS Office licenses with the new Symphony. Symphony is also integrated in Notes 8, too. Consequently, I believe IBM will make ongoing improvements and code corrections as time moves forward.
Yes, that's my experience too. I never ever had any problem with O3 (OpenOffice.org) but never succeeded in installing the IBM version. That is the reason, it is not reviewed here - I simply don't get it installed :o
kostenlose programme
So on this very day (Feb 6th 2009) I've gone through 3 different Office Suites
- Open Office
- IBM Lotus Symphony
- Starmaker Office
Each one has there perks and there downfalls I'll admit it as quick as anyone else, I was (perhaps the keyword) partial to Open Office as I found things rather nice to use but rather slugish (don't be blamin Ram on this one folks I'm runnin on 1.5 Gig)
But speaking of Ram so I thought I would do a lil research to see what is the ram spects for each one of these products PLUS I thought I would toss in Microsoft Office 2007 Ultimate (I only use the Ultimate one cause it has everything even though I did look and the ram usage for any other flavor of office suite by Microsoft is no different) so anyways here's what I found:
Open Office needs at minimum 256 but requires 512
IBM Lotus Symphony needs (my guess is the same) it doesn't say on the website but it does say that it is based on the Open Office Code (so once again 256 min but requires 512)
SoftMaker Office - it also doesn't say however it claims that the paid version can run on minimum resources to the point of runnin it smoothly on Win 2000
Microsoft Office 2007 asks for 256 and up (depending on what you want to do)
I currently have Lotus Symphony on my computer as I type this, I'm unsure if I'm going to keep it or not, as I have thought about putting out the money (as much as I REALLY don't want to) and buy Microsoft Office 2007
But I do know that what I use MUST be compatible with OpenOffice as I stated once before I work on a few different computers and keep things up and running and the other computer have open office on them with numerous files saved as the .odt format that open office uses...
So if you have any suggestions by all means let me know.
- Shane -
Before buying some from Microsoft Corp., please take a look at this link:
http://secunia.com/advisories/34572/
It is well known the fact that MS Office has many security issues - some
of them, known for years! -, which have not been patched yet.
Although, here we are talking only about free products, my advice, for you,
is to buy the latest Star Office version. Here's the link:
http://www.sun.com/software/staroffice/
If you are a student, you can get your copy for free.
thank you for sharing the information
I first started using OO when it was brought to my attention a few years back and I ditched Microsoft Office 03 (except frontpage) for it, and now I find that on my girlfriends parents computer when I updated to the latest that it installed anywhere from 1-7 "Unknown Devices" to the computer, which really freakd me out as I do all the admin and cleanup stuff on that computer as well as mine and they both basically have the same stuff on it so when this happened I decided to stay safe from OO and remove it from that computer as well as my own, I've been searchin for somethin that is .odt compatible since that's the default save format for OO.
So if you have any suggestions let me know, as I prefer not to use anythin OO based just because of the fact that I know they got a lil freaked by it as well.
try using portable open office, no install, just run from the directory on the hard drive or from a usb drive
and softmaker office can read and write *.odt files :)
try using softmaker office 2006 http://www.softmakeroffice.com/ . they give this software for free. it is fully compatible with office 2003 through textmaker as word and planmaker as excel.
Why don't you just use portable version of OO. You can put it wherever you want. You know what is portable, right?
http://drop.io/OpenOfficePortable/asset/ooo-portable-3-0-1-en-paf-exe
I'm fully aware of what portable is, however when maintaining other peoples computers and recommending software for them I NEVER give them "portable" software.
Actually, If I were "maintaining other peoples computers and recommending software" I would always point them to portable, that way their PC would be less prone to unintentional misintallation(s)/mususes.
Openoffice is OK, but something is really annoying -- every time you install it, remember to remove the temporary folder from your desktop, which is unfortunately over 100M. And you should first uninstall the older version if you want to install new one, because new version will be the OpenOffice X.X folder in program files. And after uninstall, you might want to manually delete the older folder to make it neat. Maybe all these are trivial -- I am just think what the goal of their software, to make thing simpler?
IBM products? as big and slow as Lotus Notes or EClipse? Maybe I should give a try.
thank you webmaster good blog
cy, what do you think of SoftMaker Office 2006?
once you go to Office 2007, there is no going back. It is like watching TV in color compared to black and white.
It is unbelievable how much more productive I have become, how I don't waste time trying to make my spreadsheets look nice. I just make them look nice, without effort.
I know it costs money, but ask yourself - how much is your time worth?
Hi,
I think this subject depends on the intensity of how an Office suite is used and how compatible you must be in sharing your documents.
For intensive and professional usage of an Office Suite combined with necessary intercommunication with others (mostly so in the business world) there is no doubt that MS Office is the defacto standard. Specifically in international businesses the widely spread MS Office is the only way to go. Unfortunately so MS let's you pay for that. Imho the MS Office suite is overpriced but due to the lack of alternatives businesses are paying for it.
But there are a lot of less professional and intensive usage areas of an Office suite where the free products reviewed here are very capable to fulfill the individual needs. I am actually using both, MS Office and Open Office on my computer - depending on what I wanna do and who is the receiver of the outcome.
Anyways, we are reviewing Freeware here and, thus, MS Office is not a contender in this category.
Best regards,
George
normally I love free software, it is just in this category Office 2007 has no competition.
I recomment Kingsoft Office, a Chinese freeware which is the fastest office I've ever tried.
BTW, it's easy and fast to save as PDF too.
English
http://www.kingsoftresearch.com/
Janpanese
http://www.kingsoft.jp/
Chinese
http://www.wps.cn/
Ive just tried out Kingsoft Office 07, it is free, you download a rar file (48MB)from the chinese site, and that is the free version.
Loads alot faster than GoOO, I was working with my file immediately whereas I used to wait around 15-20 seconds for the GoOO Splash screen to appear, load then have the write or calc app sluggishly appear.
Alot lighter on resources than the old Office 2003 too, even though it is almost identical in looks and function!
Im truly impressed! I just wish it had a portable version. I tried softmaker office 2006 and while it is a good application it is basic, especially with the spreadsheet appliction. the spreadsheet application almost took me back to the office 97 days. There wasnt even the function to comment on cells, which is something I use alot in my day to day spreadsheet uses. Also, from trying it out on my LiberKey setup, AbiWord is alot better than the word processor application.
So for me, out of the free Office suites available, Im really happy with Kingsoft Office 2007, as I worked alot with Office 2003 and it is 99.9% identical from what I have seen so far. Although AbiWord is a strong contender, and the only standalone spreadsheet app I have seen is GnuMeric, but have not used that, so cannot comment.
Also, I had the GoOO version of Open Office 3 installed and even with just Write and Calc, the setup was close to 500MB, whereas Kingsoft only takes up 110MB, although the downside is I would have liked to have been able to ommit the Presentation app from the installation. But this is not a big problem, I can live with it.
Yours,
Beev
Really good. I've used it long ago. Chinese website said it is free office. Chinese free version is WPS2007 28.4M. While English verison is Koffice 2009, 48M download. English website doesn't say it is free.
Unfortunately it is trialware, valid for 100 days only.