Ask Download Squad: What's the best alternative to Microsoft Office?

Filed under: Features, Windows, Office, Microsoft

Ask Download Squad: What's the best alternative to Microsoft Office?

by Marc Perton Jul 22nd 2005

Last week, we asked you to help us decide which was the best online photo-sharing service. The hands-down winner: Flickr, though there were a few votes for other services, including Smugmug, Fotki and Winkflash. Here's this week's question: Writing yesterday's post about Microsoft's efforts to get users to upgrade to Office 2003 got me thinking: if they're having that much trouble getting customers to upgrade to the latest version of Office, they're probably also having a hard time getting new users to buy Office for the first time. After all, Office is expensive, and for many people, may be overkill. And there are quite a few credible alternatives to Office, including OpenOffice.org, WordPerfect Office and even Microsoft's own low-end suite, Works. So, what's your choice — or do you find that nothing but Office will do it for you? Post your answer in the Comments section below. And, if you'd like to have your question included here, send it to us using this form. We'll post one question each week.

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)

Laurie said 10:29PM on 7-21-2005

For most home-based Mac users, Appleworks gets the job done quite nicely for word processing and even spreadsheets. For presentations, Keynote is a winner and for more advanced page layout, Apple's Pages is worth a try. Unfortunately, for office-based Mac users, Microsoft Office is still the standard, even with all its cross-platform quirks.

David Chartier said 10:51PM on 7-21-2005

This question can also depend heavily on what your real uses are. Word processing? Spreadsheets? Presentations? All of the above? I often hear OpenOffice.org cited as the best all-in-one alternative for Windows, while NeoOffice is its OSX equivalent.

Personally, since I'm on OSX and don't really need a spreadsheet, I use a combination of Apple's Office-equivalents such as Mail and iCal, while a free 3rd party word processor called TextWrangler suits me just fine. Kinda nice that all those apps are free on OSX. Keynote, their $80 presentation tool, (which comes with Pages, their template-infused word processor) brings my total cost for a "home-brewed" Office alternative to.. $80. Not bad.

Victor Agreda, Jr. said 9:34AM on 7-22-2005

I still use Office quite a bit because I *have* to... But the Macs we recently got in at work don't have Office on them. Yet our students do all their work in Office! So I've installed NeoOffice/J to accomodate them.

My preferences are these:
Word Processing- TextEdit (old skool I know), Notebook (from Circus Ponies), although I've been eyeing Nisus Writer...
Spreadsheet- again, I'm looking at Mariner's Calc app, but if I can't have Excel I guess it's AppleWorks for me. Personally I think AW is a blight upon the platform at this point.
Presentations- Keynote all the way man.
Layout- Pages, woohoo! It is NOT a word processor. It is a word blender.

Mail, iCal, etc. as well. Anyone who uses MS Works should have their head examined. My father-in-law used it up until a few months ago (when he went from Win98 to WinXP) and it wouldn't even open Word docs. Huh?

Did you know TextEdit will open Word docs quite nicely? And has anyone used ThinkFree?

Erzengel said 9:55AM on 7-22-2005

I use OpenOffice.org. you keep things small and simple, no need for tons of space wasted on who-knows-what content. And yet is good enough to open Word and XL files.

Andrew Stewart said 10:21AM on 7-22-2005

For a simple Word Processor I use AbiWord - http://www.abisource.com/ - As for a outlook replacement, well I have thunderbird, and for everything every thing else there is mastercard... I mean OpenOffice - http://www.openoffice.org/ - I do still have to use Word at school now and then but I have Abi Word running there is use it most of the time :-)

safrecko said 10:36AM on 7-22-2005

Hmm..weird.. no one so far uses MS Office. I think the competition (WordPerfect, OpenOffice, AbiWord, and what they're all called) are "ok", but they don't have anything on Office 2003. It's, hands down, the best suite out there (closest competitor: Office for Mac which is at least equally as good). Sure it's not free by a longshot, but it's interface is the most coherent, it's features are the most extensive (minus a good bibliography component) and most well integrated.

There's a reason why all the others still try to copy Office's interface and features.

With that said, with Office 2000 (maybe even 97) the features are mostly cosmetic, and not worth the upgrade from version to version. I'll take my Office suite 2003 and keep it until the open source competitors become more mature (feature and interface-wise).

If price is a non-issue, Office 2003 is king!

Hal Rottenberg said 12:21PM on 7-22-2005

I'd like to extend the commentary to include Project, OneNote, and Visio. They are a part of the Office Suite, but not typically included. I like OoO a lot, but haven't used it enough to really compare it to Office 2003. I use Office for work, and in particular we use Project and Visio quite a bit. OneNote is just something on the side that's very unique.

Project I don't care for, but Visio rocks. I require the ability to use Visio stencils because that is the standard in my industry. (http://www.visiocafe.com/) Do I even have an alternative? I don't know.

Andrew Evans said 12:58PM on 7-22-2005

I use TextEdit for my word processing needs. I love its speed and unbloated feel. For the rare occasion where I need a spreadsheet or presentation, it's NeoOffice/J. It has everything I need for free. I may purchase KeyNote, since I have a communications class this year. I really wish all the office suites would pare things down a bit, though. NeoOffice and Word both take a long time to load, even on fast machines, and their UI's could learn a lot from Aqua.

Miguel Lopes said 1:50PM on 7-22-2005

I think Office is going to stay, as some have said, it's precey and quirky and even buggy, but it's the best (so far) and the de facto standard. Some individual apps in other suites may be better, but as a whole Office wins. As for which version, I think there was a big improvement in stability from 97 to 2000. Then XP was forgettable, and 2003 is just prettier. However, as far as people buy that line, its going to be hard to stop the upgrade disease unless you force a whole corporation to stop at Office 2000 or so...

Jason said 2:03PM on 7-22-2005

I think yu have to answer this question on an application by application basis.

For Microsoft Word I suggest the free, light, and super-stable AbiWord. It looks and feels just like WORD, but more stable... and takes up less memory:

AbiWord = 9.2k
Word = 38.7k

For Email I suggest GMAIL--of course. It's faster, takes up much less memory. Of course it doesn't have calendar and (robust) contact management--but give Google some time!

Marc Orchant said 2:24PM on 7-22-2005

Great points in a number of the comments here. For me, it comes down to Outlook. Everything else being equal (it's not but let's just pretend for the sake of discussion that it is), there is no real replacement for Outlook. I know a lot of people dislike it immensely - if all you want is an e-mail client Outlook is overkill.

But if you want an application that seamlessly integrates mail, calendar, tasks, and activity tracking there's nothing else out there that can do what Outlook does (except Entourage on the Mac of course and that's Office X). Perhaps one day Mozilla will get a calendar and task tool built that integrates into Thunderbird. Perhaps one day, Mitch Kapor will actually have something to show for his open source investments.

Right now, there are only two alternatives for a total personal information management environment - Notes and Barca. Notes is... oh don't even get me started - it's a horror. I mean it's 2005 and they still can't properly format e-mail!

Barca is a decent Outlook knock-off from the makers of PocoMail but there's no integration with the rest of your applications (they're still beta testing PDA synchronization a year after releasing the product).

And yes, if you consider the entire Office product line and include Visio, Project, and OneNote - game over.

As long as you have the $$.

Paul Short said 2:45PM on 7-22-2005

I've been using OpenOffice from OpenOffice.org for months now and love it. It's cross platform, handles just about anything MS Office outputs and even exports files in PDF format.

Jason Clarke said 3:27PM on 7-22-2005

Here's another vote for Office. It surprises me that in the 8 years since Office 97, a viable alternative to Outlook has not yet been released (and by viable, I mean for all the reasons that Marc Orchant states above), and yet one hasn't. Add to that the fact that Office is a de-facto standard, and it truly is game over. A company I'm familiar with recently downgraded all "non-management" staff to Open Office from Office to save on licensing. I can honestly say that I believe they're on track to lose as much to lost productivity dealing with interoperability issues as they would have spent on full licensing. I know that Open Office is working hard on working seamlessly with Office documents; I just don't think they're there yet, based on this experience.

Oh, and here's a prediction for you: I believe that Microsoft will buy or clone Mindjet's Mind Manager mind mapping software for inclusion into Office sooner rather than later.

David Chartier said 3:54PM on 7-22-2005

Jason Clarke, there's part of the problem: competitors do and have shown up for Office, but M$ does such a great job of either A) buying them all out and destroying them B) marketing them into oblivion or C) simply destroying them to save all that money from not buying them.

M$ isn't a company interested in competition, and they've historically gone to great lengths to prove this as a fact. If the companies they don't assimilate or annihilate are lucky, they get to live on with a "niche" product that sees mild but sustainable success.

C.K. Sample, III said 4:04PM on 7-22-2005

OpenOffice is good as a Word / Powerpoint replacement. NeoOffice is great on OS X, but certain macros that you may have created in Word won't always run nicely, and the comments and revision features of Word don't translate well (if at all) depending upon each user's individual set up.

Excel is the office program that isn't really replaceable by anything else currently. None of the alternatives are up to Excel's level and they often lack the ability to work with a lot of the plug-ins that different businesses (esp. in the financial sector) have built for Excel over time. If any of the office alternatives come out with an Excel-killer that really sets a new bar, then we'll have a real possibility of an Office replacement. Until then, most people are going to be better off using whatever program they like for the early prep work and then copying and pasting into MSOffice whenever they want to make it play nicely with others.

Tris Hussey said 4:19PM on 7-22-2005

I haven't tried AbiWord, but will at least look at it. I had OpenOffice for a long while, but purely for diskspace reasons had to uninstall it. That being said, I have to keep Office 2003, don't like it, but have to have it. Unless the whole team is in OO, then one person flipping to PowerPoint or Word can ruin everyone's day.

On the Outlook note... I have it installed, perhaps I should uninstall it ... I've been using Thunderbird and Sunbird for months and haven't missed Outlook at all!

Mike said 4:35PM on 7-22-2005

I have to wholeheartedly disagree with you, safrecko, on the statement that "if price is a non-issue, Office 2003 is King."

I have both OpenOffice.org (because it's my preference) and Office 2003 on my computer. I wish it didn't have to be that way, since collectively they take up about a terraflop of disk space and make Adobe CS look conservative on RAM.

I have used Word 2003 for one feature only, the comments, because a client was using them. I find that I'd rather be without a feature than have it implemented so poorly (I find Acrobat to be much better at that). Word has also been terrible at maintaining styles, working with images and diagrams, and generally just about everything I've had to do on the project.

I have also used Access quite a bit to model new databases quickly and easily, but I find that with the 2.0 release of oOo, the Base app is great -- not to mention when I'm through modelling the database I don't just have a model, I have a working MySQL db instead of an unusable Access POS I have to convert.

Microsoft is trying to create a "platform" with Office and the main problems with that are:

-without all the components, it's not really a platform successfully anyway, and there's nothing on this earth that'll make me go back to Outlook.

-some of us, even for fairly advanced office app uses, do not require a "platform," we want a word processor, a spreadsheet, and whatever else.

A final point: Personally, if I were an Office 2000 user and didn't want to spend the money or disk space to upgrade, I would find those ads calling me a dinosaur infuriatingly insulting and would take my business to someone who I thought would treat me better in 2 years.

Thomas said 7:24PM on 7-22-2005

I like text edit myself. And either Apple Works or NeoOfficeJ if I need more power. Mariner Software has some great products too though. http://www.marinersoftware.com

eleongonzales said 9:12PM on 7-22-2005

NeoOffice on the mac at home is the way for me. I also use thunderbird/ical for my email and schedule. I am bound by office at work though and like one of the other comments i have to say excel is still on top. I have no use for spreadsheets at home so it doesn't affect me. I like open office because I can use it in linux/mac/xp with out any problems, which makes it nice when traveling.

Matt said 11:10PM on 7-22-2005

For me, a mix of gnumeric and abiword is doing the job for me. That said, i'm not a heavy user of either, not lately at least. In a pinch though, Vim is the best solution

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