Best Free Office Suite
When it comes to free substitutes for MS Office, it's pointless to compare the features of this commercial product developed by a huge army of well-paid programmers with those applications developed and maintained by equally qualified unpaid volunteers. What I will ask is: will the software meet the needs of an average user, a home user, a freelancer, or a small business? Many big businesses will also find satisfaction especially when they consult their bank balances.
My prime choice is - without doubt - OpenOffice.org 2. 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. With the exception of the very new MS document format for which free translators are available, it 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 if you're working on large documents. On the other hand, have you ever used them?
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.
OpenOffice.org
Website: http://www.openoffice.org
Download link: http://www.openoffice.org
Author: OpenOffice.org
Current version: 2.4.1
Version date: June 2008
Download File size: 210 MB
License: Free Software
Operating systems supported: Windows 98, ME, NT, 2k, XP,Vista, Linux (rpm, deb), Solaris (x86,SPARC), Mac
Additional Software Required: Java Runtime Environment
64 Bit version available: No
Portable version available: Yes
Non-English languages supported: Many
OxygenOffice
Website: http://ooop.wiki.sourceforge.net/
Download link: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=170021
Author: OpenOffice.org
Current version: 2.4.1
Version date: June 2008
Download File size: 210 MB
License: Free Software
Operating systems supported: Windows 98, ME, NT, 2k, XP,Vista, Linux (rpm, deb)
Additional Software Required: Java Runtime Environment
64 Bit version available: Linux (rpm, deb)
Portable version available: Yes
Non-English languages supported: Many
AbiWord
Website: http://www.abisource.com/
Download link: http://www.abisource.com/download/
Current version: 2.6.3
Version date: 2008
Download File size: 5,7 MB
License: Free Software
Operating systems supported: Windows 2k, XP,Vista, Linux, BSD, Solaris (2.6, 7,8,9,10), AIX, HP/UX (10.20, 11.0), OSF/1, Tru64, Mac OS X, QNX, BeOS
Additional Software Required:
64 Bit version available: nn
Portable version available: Yes
Non-English languages supported: Many
Jarte
Website: http://www.jarte.com/
Download link: http://www.jarte.com/download.html
Author: Carolina Road Software
Current version: 3.3
Version date:
Download File size: 2.58 MB
License: freeware
Operating systems supported: Windows 98, ME, NT 4.0, 2000, XP, Vista
Additional Software Required: no
64 Bit version available: no
Portable version available: yes
Non-English languages supported: yes
Other relevant information:
Gnumeric
Website: http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnumeric/index.shtml
Download link: http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnumeric/index.shtml
Current version: 1.9.1
Version date: May 2008
Download File size: 14,2 MB
License: Free Software
Operating systems supported: Windows XP,Vista, Linux
Additional Software Required: none
64 Bit version available: none
Portable version available: none
Non-English languages supported: no
This software category is maintained by Christopher (cy). Registered site visitors can contact Christopher (cy) by clicking here.
Best Free Office Suite Replacements
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KOffice (koffice.org) is pretty solid, offers:
Productivity Applications
KWord - A frame-based word processor that can work in two modes: page oriented or layout oriented
KSpread - A powerful spreadsheet application.
KPresenter - A full-featured presentation program.
Kexi - An integrated environment for creating databases and database applications.
Creativity Applications
Kivio - A Visio®-style flowcharting application.
Karbon14 - A vector drawing application.
Krita - A layered pixel image manipulation application
Management Application
KPlato - An integrated project management and planning tool.
Supporting Applications
KChart - An integrated graph and chart drawing tool.
KFormula - A powerful formula editor.
Kugar - A tool for generating business quality reports.
Version 2.0alpha is lightning fast and a complete rewrite.
Check it out, for windows, at
winkde.org/pub/kde/ports/win32/installer/kdewin-installer-gui-latest.exe
(http://winkde.org/pub/kde/ports/win32/installer/kdewin-installer-gui-lat...)
NB: This is a direct download link!
Call me simple, call me stupid ;)
- I didn't know it was available for Windows
- so I learned something and
- installed it
- the download was 768 MB on my machine
- took ages to complete
- start/closing of apps with various memory violations
- looks awfully Linux, if you get my meaning...
For me, it is a perfect example, why people won't yet go for Linux. I will not recommend it. Any enlightening instructions though would be much appreciated and could change my mind.
It's a flawed example. Based on how one office suite performs on Windows (and it's ported, not native), you see it as a reason for people not to go to Linux? Then how ready do you judge Linux when considering OpenOffice, the first choice in this category, since that is also available on Linux?
I completely agree Linux is not ready for the general public, but for reasons regarding the OS itself, not based on some ported suite run on a different OS.
Sorry, please don't get me wrong - I love Linux. But people expect something that is as 'easy' to use, as the OS they have just now. Btw: the average user 'doesn't give a damn' (Red Butler) whether it's ported or not. If my wife - who is skilled in installing programs under Windows - had done the install of KOffice, she'd thought, she'd wrecked her PC. I cannot recommend that.
I much rather get from you some hints on how to install KOffice under WinXP properly, to get it working without error messages, so I can truly play around with it. I am very curious to find alternatives, honestly. If you want to do that, please contact me via the message system. Let's not waste our time on a matter I possibly can't have an opinion about.
Maybe I interpreted your comments wrong, but I felt it was a bit unfair. It's the same as running MS Office in Wine on Linux, getting problems and then saying Windows is not a good OS.
I'm not the one who suggested KOffice, so I can't help you with hints on installing it. I could be wrong, but since it sounds like you have to install a complete KDE environment for it to even work on Windows I didn't try it out myself. I'd rather run in natively in Linux and try it. It's the same reason I won't really run Windows apps on Linux in Wine, even though it's possible, I don't see it as the best way to go.
But back on topic, keep up the good work in finding those alternatives for us, it's much appreciated :-)
Again, please don't get me wrong :)
That is exactly my point about Linux. You have to do this or that first, then edit some settings, do some 'command line acrobatics' and really in no time at all you're up and running. In case you need help, visit a forum, after you got the first answer to your question look up RTFM, read the manual, discover you don't understand it, visit a forum for help ... You will suffocate in the RTFM-loop.
See, if you want to eat a slice of toast, you don't want to construct the toaster first, do you?
I would love Linux to be THE alternative operating system, alas, it isn't (yet).
As a new user of Microsoft Office 2007 on a Vista computer, I have found it time-consuming to learn the new ribbon feature that has displaced the familiar old menu toolbars. However I have found the following website useful as it has freeware (not shareware) that adds the old Office 2003 menu toolbars as an add-in for WORD, EXCEL, POWEROINT and ACCESS.
http://in.geocities.com/shahshaileshs/
So far I have used the add-ins for WORD and EXCEL and found them very useful.
Leslie Lauw
Thanks a lot, Leslie :) As I do not own a copy of MS Office 2007, any further comments are very welcome.
Google Docs.
The latest version of Jarte supports .docx files.
Are you sure? Who tell you that?
If you even bothered to look, it's stated on their website: "Opens files with file extension RTF, file extension DOC, and file extension DOCX (new default format in Word 2007)"
Hi,
you might want to check out Go-OO.
Go-OO is a fork of OpenOffice that has quite a few impressive features which really ought to be in official OO, but for some reason or another aren´t, such as support for OpenXML, better Microsoft Binary support, Excel VBA macros, Visio diagrams and Word Perfect Graphics support. It also boasts significantly better start times.
http://go-oo.org/
Best regards,
George
I use Go-oo and am very happy with it. It seems faster than Symphony, but to be fair, I have not tested both equally. Symphony certainly is the better-looking option and may be used to surf the web too. Very competent replacements for MS Office. If only they could get good statistics packages...
IBM's "Symphony" is Now Full Release, it is out of the Beta Stages Now...
Great! Is this better than OpenOffice?
Thanks for that, I am downloading it now. I love the tabs, makes working in spreadsheets and word much easier. I found useful when doing several editorials on different tabs, then combining them at the end far easier.
Tony
Some better Office alternatives are
1. 602 TAB -- Supports best to MS Office formats, but it has only doc/excel and Photo editors.
2. Easy office is a all in one office suite with many things together, and quite cheaper than MSO
I haven't tried this yet myself, but Dia appears to be positioning itself as a partial alternative to Visio, though the the latest release is still in beta (0.96.1).
The following has been excerpted from their web site (http://live.gnome.org/Dia):
"Dia is a GTK+ based diagram creation program for Linux, Unix and Windows released under the GPL license.
"Dia is roughly inspired by the commercial Windows program 'Visio', though more geared towards informal diagrams for casual use. It can be used
to draw many different kinds of diagrams. It currently has special objects to help draw entity relationship diagrams, UML diagrams, flowcharts,
network diagrams, and many other diagrams. It is also possible to add support for new shapes by writing simple XML files, using a subset of SVG
to draw the shape.
"It can load and save diagrams to a custom XML format (gzipped by default, to save space), can export diagrams to a number of formats, including
EPS, SVG, XFIG, WMF and PNG, and can print diagrams (including ones that span multiple pages).
"We feel Dia is in a state where it can be actively used. Many features are implemented and the code is quite solid and mature. Try downloading
Dia and tell us what you think of it. If you find any bugs, please report them with Gnome Bugzilla. Check out the code too, you might even want to
contribute... "
IBM have a free office suite called 'Symphony'. Its a BETA product, but I have been using it for the last 3 months and loaded it onto several other computers and its wonderful. In fact I think its better than OpenOffice in its formating and style.
http://symphony.lotus.com/software/lotus/symphony/home.jspa
This BETA version is free.
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