Best free office-type suites
Free productivity suite challenges MS Office
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By
Scott Spanbauer
The apps in OpenOffice.org 3 provide the same basic functionality as their Microsoft Office counterparts and offer many enhancements of their own. Still, just because they're free doesn't mean they're the best choice for everyone, particularly Office-centric organizations. |
Free is good, but not always good enough
It's tempting to recommend free or open-source software as an alternative to commercial operating systems and applications simply because the programs are free. After all, nobody wants to spend hundreds of dollars for software when a product that's nearly as good — or maybe better — is available for no charge.
However, when it comes to your precious business documents, giving up Microsoft Office for a free alternative is not so easy.
For example, if one of your clients has standardized on Microsoft Word for text documents — especially if the client uses one of the program's more advanced features — you can't assume that OpenOffice.org or a Web-hosted program such as Google Docs will produce exactly the same document as the Microsoft product. You'll have to open, save, and print the file in both programs to be sure.
But this doesn't mean that you have to install Microsoft Office on every computer you use. Microsoft allows you to install Office on two computers, as long as the second one is a portable device (or, in the case of the $149 Home and Student Edition, any three computers).
Nevertheless, Microsoft's definition of a "device" is fairly restrictive. A quick read through Microsoft's Office licensing FAQ is revealing: the answer to nearly every "can I install it on ...?" question is "No."
Personally, buying even one copy of Office would stretch my budget. Buying more than one copy is out of the question. All of this highlights one of OpenOffice.org's main attractions: it's free to download and install on as many Windows, Mac, or Linux PCs as you want.
The programs in OpenOffice.org are the Writer word processor, Calc spreadsheet, and Impress presentation application. All three applications have similar features and near-perfect file-format compatibility with their Office counterparts: Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, respectively. That includes Office 2007's new .docx, xlsx, and .ppsx file formats.
OpenOffice.org has no equivalent to Outlook, however; in its place, the OpenOffice.org site recommends the Mozilla Foundation's Thunderbird e-mail program with the Lightning calendar extension installed. This is a recommendation I agreed with in my review of personal information managers that appeared in the July 31 Best Software column.
OpenOffice.org includes three other programs: the Draw vector-graphics app, the Math equation editor (many of whose features are also built into Word), and the Base relational database, which corresponds to Access.
It's difficult to compare OpenOffice.org with other Office editions because Microsoft offers almost as many versions of Office as it does Windows Vista, all of which have different combinations of programs, including desktop publishing, electronic-form creation, and note-taking tools.
OpenOffice.org lacks many of these auxiliary apps. However, it's worth noting that the least expensive version of Office that includes a relational database is the $499 Office Professional. So if you can do without the extras, you can save yourself a chunk of change.
OPENOFFICE.ORG 3.0
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Free version
85 More info |
Let no one tell you that OpenOffice.org beats Office in the features department. For starters, OpenOffice.org uses the standard menu and toolbar interface. If you've fallen in love with Office 2007's ribbon, OpenOffice.org may feel a bit crude.
However, if you use Office 2003 or earlier, OpenOffice.org 3 will look very familiar. Many of the menu commands are even identical.
Nevertheless, your search for certain of the commands you use in Office will be in vain. For example, when I use Word, I often switch to the program's Outline view to help organize my thoughts. Now I use OpenOffice.org's Writer app and Google Docs for most of my work, neither of which offers anything like Word's outline view.
One of the most important additions to Writer in version 3 is a mail-merge wizard, though another key writing tool is still AWOL. While OpenOffice.org spell-checks your documents and even fixes errors automatically as you type, it has no grammar checker. In Word, this feature can make your dashed-off prose read like you spent years perfecting it. For many of us, Word's grammar checker alone justifies the cost of Microsoft Office.
Figure 1. OpenOffice.org's Writer app includes many of Microsoft Word's best features, such as a spell checker, but not a grammar checker. In this example, unfortunately, OpenOffice has flagged a correctly spelled word, online, as incorrect.
I may have missed some of the differences between Excel and Calc, OpenOffice.org's spreadsheet app, but Calc's .xls files function the same way in both programs. Calc lacks some of Excel's bells and whistles, such as real-time previews of graphic representations of your data.
Calc and other OpenOffice.org applications can run many, but not all, embedded VBA scripts, which may be a deal-breaker if your business depends on one or more carefully programmed and scripted Excel worksheets. In that case, I recommend you stay with Excel. Otherwise, you'll have to triple-check the results of every macro you run.
Previous versions of both Calc and Excel limited worksheets to 256 columns. That limitation is now 1024 columns in Calc and 16,384 in Excel. Perhaps someone out there really needs to create a worksheet with more than 1,024 columns, in which case Calc also won't do.
Some features are definitely worth paying for
If you spend lots of time creating and presenting slides, you deserve the best possible tool for the job. OpenOffice.org's Impress presentation program is suitable for anyone who occasionally needs to create a series of overheads. Impress offers stock backgrounds, cinematic transitions, and audio, though PowerPoint offers more options in each category and presents them (no pun intended) more clearly.
For example, Impress comes with only two presentation templates. The program does include a tool for importing and managing templates you download from the OpenOffice.org site or elsewhere, but the process is not easy or obvious.
Nor are Impress's templates as sophisticated as those in PowerPoint 2007, which ships with six templates preinstalled and has hundreds more that you can download from the Web directly via the program's File, Open menu. Also, PowerPoint's stock slide backgrounds and layouts are better-looking than Impress's. Like Word's grammar checker, PowerPoint's templates will make Office worth paying for all by themselves.
Base serves as both a standalone database manager and as a front end to such database engines as Access, MySQL, and Oracle JDBC. This is one trick that Access itself doesn't pull off. But unlike other OpenOffice.org programs, Base is not file-compatible with Microsoft Office, specifically Access's .mbd and .mdbx (Access 2007) file formats.
For example, I have an Access database that I'd like to move to Base, but although the program can import the data tables from the database — admittedly, the most important part — Base can't import the forms, reports, or carefully crafted code underlying the queries. I'll likely transfer the database someday, but only when I'm prepared to recreate much of its functionality from scratch.
Not every PC needs a copy of Microsoft Office
Despite these limitations, OpenOffice.org keeps pace with Microsoft Office in many important ways. OpenOffice.org applications let you save files in Adobe's .pdf format, something versions of Office prior to 2007 didn't offer.
Microsoft's plug-in for Office 2007 exports files to the .pdf format, but OpenOffice.org's PDF exporter offers many more features, including the ability to encrypt the resulting file and set printing and editing permissions.
Users of Mozilla's Firefox and Thunderbird apps are accustomed to augmenting those programs with free add-ons, so they'll feel right at home with OpenOffice.org's online library of extensions, which include dictionaries, templates, and even a PDF importer that lets you turn Acrobat files into editable documents.
Even though I'm a staunch supporter of open-source software and software alternatives in general, and even though I'm a long-time user of OpenOffice.org, I can't recommend the program to everyone.
If you use Microsoft Office 2007 on a desktop PC and a laptop, you don't need OpenOffice.org. Likewise, if complete compatibility with Microsoft Office features and file formats is a must, the cost of buying additional copies of Office is easy to justify.
Still, OpenOffice.org is a great choice for many PC users. If you're happy with Office 2003 or an earlier version and can't justify spending hundreds of dollars to install Office 2007 on multiple PCs in your home or office, OpenOffice.org 3 is the obvious solution. This is especially true if you need a database but don't want to pay the premium for a version of Office that includes Access.
Given today's tight economy, users contemplating a Microsoft Office purchase owe it to themselves to give OpenOffice.org a spin first.
Scott Spanbauer writes frequently for PC World, Business 2.0, CIO, Forbes ASAP, and Fortune Small Business. He has contributed to several books and was technical reviewer of Jim Aspinwall's PC Hacks.
Microsoft offers lifeline for Office 2007 users
Many users hate the new Ribbon interface that was introduced in Office 2007. A common complaint is users can't find the functions they were familiar with in earlier Office versions. Now there is some hope: Microsoft is offering, from its experimental Office Labs site, a free add-in that allows users to search for commands. At the same site you'll also find a few other useful Office freebies.
http://www.officelabs.com/Pages/Default.aspx
Use Open Office online
Many folks are curious about the possibility of using Open Office as a free alternative to Microsoft Office, but never get around to downloading and installing it. Now you can try it out online using this free service that offers you Open Office as part of an online desktop environment. I found the Linux based KDE desktop too slow to be useful for real work, but the access provided to Open Office and other Linux apps could prove valuable to anyone who wants to evaluate the capabilities of this software.
http://www.ulteo.com/home/en/home?autolang=en
Office 2007 "Save as PDF" feature added
One popular feature of the beta version of MS Office 2007, which was removed from the product prior to its official release, was the ability to save document files in PDF format. Apparently it was all down to legal arguments between Microsoft and Adobe, and Microsoft stated that the facility would be re-introduced by way of a downloadable freebie. That freebie has now been released, and adds an option to all of the Office 2007 applications to save your work as a PDF file for easy distribution and printing to those who don't have Office or who don't need to modify the files.
http://tinyurl.com/v46jc (microsoft.com)