Six office alternatives
Microsoft will release Office 2010 in June but until then there are some great alternatives.
Microsoft will release Office 2010 in June but until then there are some great alternatives.
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Six Microsoft Office alternatives
- Thread starter rpm
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Moederloos
Honorary Master
/me waits for the usual comments about why OO sucks because it does not have some obscure feature every MS office user never uses anyways
Kloofvreter
Honorary Master
Or they could just continue working with Office 2007 until 2010 is released. 
Well I'm still getting with Office 2007. It takes me 5 times longer to do anything because they've moved, hidden and replaced old menus. I had to scour the help file to find how to get the macro's menu back. You have to enable the developer toolbar ribbon!
Who knows how more obscure Office 2010 will be. I want to downgrade back to Office 2003.
Who knows how more obscure Office 2010 will be. I want to downgrade back to Office 2003.
Could you please indicate, in summary, what it is that does not work in the respective alternatives? I am sure most people would find it interesting.
czc
Honorary Master
IBM Lotus Symphony
http://symphony.lotus.com/software/lotus/symphony/home.nsf/home
http://symphony.lotus.com/software/lotus/symphony/home.nsf/home
Open Office Renaissance
Open Office have recently created a new project in which it is being overalled. That project is Open Office Renaissance and it has the mission statement :
“Create a User Interface so that OpenOffice.org becomes the users' choice not only out of need, but also out of desire”
Basically they have thrown the development open to the community and I think it will create a massively usable program.
The same idea was applied to Firefox, and that was responsible for Firefox being the choice of over 25% of all computer users today.
Open Office have recently created a new project in which it is being overalled. That project is Open Office Renaissance and it has the mission statement :
“Create a User Interface so that OpenOffice.org becomes the users' choice not only out of need, but also out of desire”
Basically they have thrown the development open to the community and I think it will create a massively usable program.
The same idea was applied to Firefox, and that was responsible for Firefox being the choice of over 25% of all computer users today.
The_Unbeliever
Honorary Master
I prefer to use Office2003 above Office2007.
At home we use OpenOffice - it does the job just as well.
The_Unbeliever
Honorary Master
Please indicate what doesn't work. Your statement doesn't hold much weight just because of that.
Okay that's logic FAIL for you. Its like saying that 6 alternatives to BMW is bad because there should be only "the alternative."
Anyway, getting back to the the alternatives to M$ Office. Remember M$ Office is expensive, whereas the alternatives are mostly free. For that reason you should be grateful for what you get.
Kloofvreter
Honorary Master
Don't bring price into the equation here. People here pirate anything, so it's not a factor.
The_Unbeliever
Honorary Master
Don't bring price into the equation here. People here pirate anything, so it's not a factor.
Rather use product activation and product keys as a factor
Kloofvreter
Honorary Master
Rather use product activation and product keys as a factor
LOL
I was referring to people saying that M$ products are too expensive, and going on the next day about their ISP possibly blocking torrents/P2P. Go figure :wtf: 
I would not classify PivotTables as obscure. I would rather put a gun to my head than use the OpenOffice pivot functionality. Just because it supports *some* pivot functionality does not mean it is working correctly. And it is not obscure.
Try to do the following quick analysis in OpenOffice 3: Scenario we want to analyze expense accounts of sales people. Our data source consists of three columns Month, Person and Amount. We want a simple report that gives the person with the total amount (sum) as well as the % of total amount next to it. Err... it doesn't work because you can't have the same field more than once in the data area. Of course there are messy work-arounds, but if the pivot stops you from doing simple analysis like this I would rather pay the R400 odd bucks (effective) for Excel rather than waste people's time. [ The last version I have tested was OO 3.01 - this might have changed.]
I would not blame OpenOffice developers - rather I am sick of the open source community always pointing to OpenOffice as the MS Office killer yet it is simply not up to par in many business environments and (almost) no big company is supporting it with resources. Even the OpenOffice developers complain (http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/12/28/0124230).
So yes - OpenOffice will probably do if you want to make lists, or want to calculate mortgage repayments. Trying to use it as a serious business tool -- currently possible but unproductive compared to Excel.
czc
Honorary Master
I quite like MS Office 2007. Once you get used to it, it works well.
Rate My ISP
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Google Docs and Zoho "alternatives" to MS Office? :wtf:
I say same of O
What boggles my mind is that "she" refused O
because "she" could not make the "radical" jump from MS Office 2003 to O v2.something - so we bought a new licence to Office 2003 for "her." Then a week or three later "she" got a new laptop, but was very comfortable with the "much more radical" leap to Office 2007. Go figure. "She" is very much a nano-scale example of the SA-market as a whole: not willing to change at all, unless said change is in-line with current comfort-set, even if out-of-comfort change is less disruptive. Sad, but true.