Alternative for Office

[SauRoNZA]

Depends if you rely on Outlook or not. If it is just a Word or Excel alternative, Google Docs or LibreOffice... I have yet to find an Outlook replacement... although email clients are out there... none come close to Outlook.

I don't understand this fascination with Outlook.

It's terribly bloated and if I could run my work mail through something else I would.

 

[sajunky]

I don't understand this fascination with Outlook.

It's terribly bloated and if I could run my work mail through something else I would.

For this reason many people use old OE (even having Outlook installed with Office). One of the reason to run XP.

 

[Bryn]

I don't understand this fascination with Outlook.

It's terribly bloated and if I could run my work mail through something else I would.

You should update your version to the latest one then. Mine is super fast. Absolutely love it. Handles my 6 email accounts without so much as a stutter, and it takes about two seconds to open.

 

[SauRoNZA]

You should update your version to the latest one then. Mine is super fast. Absolutely love it. Handles my 6 email accounts without so much as a stutter, and it takes about two seconds to open.

I didn't say anything about speed...

 

[SauRoNZA]

For this reason many people use old OE (even having Outlook installed with Office). One of the reason to run XP.

Yeah I could understand that notion.

Personally I would run it all through Gmail if I could, but sadly our company setup doesn't allow for that with shared mailboxes.

 

[Bryn]

I didn't say anything about speed...

If you have no issue with the snappiness of Outlook, what do you mean when you say it's bloated?

Is it the number of buttons? If so, just minimise the ribbon as I do.

 

[SauRoNZA]

If you have no issue with the snappiness of Outlook, what do you mean when you say it's bloated?

Is it the number of buttons? If so, just minimise the ribbon as I do.

It's just an application that does too much in one thing.

It's more in my way to getting the job done than enabling me to do it better.

I love the new Windows 10 Mail on my home machine...sadly company is too backwards to upgrade us in a timely fashion.

But even then not sure it would do shared mailboxes.

You need to know where I'm coming from though as a long time Apple Mail user and huge Gmail fan Outlook just has too much faff I don't use.

Not to mention the search is slow and useless.

 

[Bryn]

It's just an application that does too much in one thing.

It's more in my way to getting the job done than enabling me to do it better.

I love the new Windows 10 Mail on my home machine...sadly company is too backwards to upgrade us in a timely fashion.

But even then not sure it would do shared mailboxes.

You need to know where I'm coming from though as a long time Apple Mail user and huge Gmail fan Outlook just has too much faff I don't use.

Not to mention the search is slow and useless.

Maybe it's a version thing, but I just don't see where you're coming from.

- Outlook tries to do mail, and pretty much only mail. The calendar, contact and task buttons are tiny and out of the way.
- The design is modern and fairly minimalist. Very pleasant to look at.
- Opens quickly and navigation is snappy.
- Search is pretty quick - seldom longer than 2 seconds. Not sure why this is an issue.
- Customisability is decent. A few default options weren't to my liking but were easy to change.
- The advanced functionality is totally hidden.

For me Outlook is heaven, and was the single best thing about returning to Windows from Ubuntu a few years ago.

 

[Arthur]

+1 Office 365 and Outlook.

I use three Office 365 Enterprise accounts. I have Outlook on all my PCs and devices, including Surface, Win phone, and Nexus 6P. Everything integrates beautifully, especially the Win devices. Contacts. Calendars. Mails. OneNotes. Reading Lists. Creating, editing, printing, opening, reading and sending Word, Excel and PPT files used by 99% of people with real PCs doing real work is not a problem. No formatting and rendering funnies. 100% compatible. Always on the latest version. Terabytes of cloud storage. It just works, day in day out, year in year out. What a pleasure.

 

[backstreetboy]

+1 Office 365 and Outlook.

I use three Office 365 Enterprise accounts. I have Outlook on all my PCs and devices, including Surface, Win phone, and Nexus 6P. Everything integrates beautifully, especially the Win devices. Contacts. Calendars. Mails. OneNotes. Reading Lists. Creating, editing, printing, opening, reading and sending Word, Excel and PPT files used by 99% of people with real PCs doing real work is not a problem. No formatting and rendering funnies. 100% compatible. Always on the latest version. Terabytes of cloud storage. It just works, day in day out, year in year out. What a pleasure.

Yeah sure IBIWISI. Then there is also the fact that their version of OOXML was differing from the official OOXML standard making it a real PITA for other office suits and the open source community. The EU had to force them to change that with Office 15 but many people still use office 2010 etc. out there.

 

[neo_]

Just thought I'd add my two-cents on email: eM Client is pretty good. They just released v7, but I'm not a fan of that UI, so I'm sticking to v6 for now. It does have full exchange support, not that I use it. Overall, I find it much more reliable than Outlook when managing a whole bunch of accounts. Outlook OST files kept borking out on me, and one account landed up taking 5-10 megs to send/receive, but there was nothing new to sync.

 

[Jim West]

Hiya

I'm finally upgrading my laptop, and its been YEARS since I got a new version of office. What's currently on the market seems crazy expensive - what are my alternatives?

Thanks!

If you are a student or a educator - you likely meet the eligibility requirements for a discount...

https://products.office.com/en-za/student/office-in-education

 

[freddster]

It comes down to what you want to use it for. I tried to use it , but I have excel docs that uses many formulas. Opened it, nothing worked. Unless I try and recreate it. Not for me. Another problem is you pay for office, for the people that support , maintain and add features to it and new releases. OfficeforFree in whatever way you use it is free for a reason. Hardly any support whatsoever.

 

[pinball wizard]

It's just an application that does too much in one thing.

And then stupidly deoesn't use MS word as itw's native text editor. So you can't use all the nice word features when typing mails. That would have made it such a nice mail client.

 

[SauRoNZA]

And then stupidly deoesn't use MS word as itw's native text editor. So you can't use all the nice word features when typing mails. That would have made it such a nice mail client.

Exactly.

It's something that costs a fortune and doesn't do any particular thing very well.

As long as someone else pays for it I use it, but personally? Nope.

 

[sajunky]

And then stupidly deoesn't use MS word as itw's native text editor. So you can't use all the nice word features when typing mails. That would have made it such a nice mail client.

I do actualy consider it a good things. Your Email receipient don't have to have MS Word installed on his machine. It is Internet after all, not MS-NET. If you want nice looking formatting, you can always use attachments in portable format.

 

[Bryn]

If you are a student or a educator - you likely meet the eligibility requirements for a discount...

https://products.office.com/en-za/student/office-in-education

Not only that - most academic institutions should have an agreement with MS to provide Office 365 free for their students.

And then stupidly deoesn't use MS word as itw's native text editor. So you can't use all the nice word features when typing mails. That would have made it such a nice mail client.

That would create compatibility issues. The message creating window in Outlook allows about as much markup as you can reasonably expect.

 

[Thor]

Hiya

I'm finally upgrading my laptop, and its been YEARS since I got a new version of office. What's currently on the market seems crazy expensive - what are my alternatives?

Thanks!

There is no alternative to office it's in a league of its own...

If you want to ditch office then you have the following lesser options available.

Libre office
Em client
Softmaker
Google docs


Or just get a office 360 subscription

 

[Thor]

Depends if you rely on Outlook or not. If it is just a Word or Excel alternative, Google Docs or LibreOffice... I have yet to find an Outlook replacement... although email clients are out there... none come close to Outlook.

This.

 

[SauRoNZA]

I do actualy consider it a good things. Your Email receipient don't have to have MS Word installed on his machine. It is Internet after all, not MS-NET. If you want nice looking formatting, you can always use attachments in portable format.

It's just an editor.

It should spit out HTML like everything else. No Word required.

Apple Mail does it just fine...

Besides I recall Word was the editor some few versions ago.