Alternate to MS Office !?

[Joe Woodbury]

I've tried the various OpenOffice products and hated them. Office 365 Personal can be purchased from Amazon for $69.99! If desperate, log into your OneDrive account and use the online Office stuff; it's pretty fantastic.

[Slacker007]

Google docs?

[ZurdoDev]

OpenOffice and Google Docs. Both great and both free.

There are only 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.

[Pualee]

I used OpenOffice a while back. I didn't like it because... it looks like it is compatible with MS Office, in most ways, but is just enough different to drive you nuts. If you are handing off any documents in electronic form to an office user (or vice versa) you could get into compatibility/display problems which will look unprofessional. On the other hand, if none of the documents will leave your computer, and it is just for tracking your own information, it will be fine.

[mikepwilson]

Yeah, I'll second OpenOffice. I DO use Office 365 at home. But that's only because I'm doing some work at home that requires it. OpenOffice does far far more than I need, and does it well.

[TheGreatAndPowerfulOz]

I would go for LibreOffice instead. It's a fork of OpenOffice since Oracle screwed the OpenOffice pooch. Also, look into Office365 from Microsoft. It's online and I believe there's a free version. Also, for simple documents, Google docs is pretty good. And the Google's spreadsheet is actually fairly rich.

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[Mark_Wallace]

Kingsoft rocks.

I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!

[Jeremy Falcon]

It cost like $200 to buy Word and Excel. I'm not *that* pro MS usually, but $200 for all the crap you can do with those two programs isn't that bad of a deal. That being said, last I checked OpenOffice was extremely compatible. Just as another alternative, the KDE project makes Calligra[^].

Jeremy Falcon

[Mycroft Holmes]

POV - US$200 seen from India is one hell of a lot more than US$200 seen from US (or Singapore for that matter). I could be disparaging about Indians not wanting to spend money on software when they are in the industry but that would be bigoted/racist or just plain rude!

Never underestimate the power of human stupidity RAH

[JMK NI]

For pure comedic value have you read the reviews for Microsoft's cheapest offering on their website, gave me a laugh anyway :laugh: http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msuk/en_GB/pdp/productID.260260400[^]

[bkyee]

Since you mentioned programming related, I assume you are doing VBA macro for your customers. Your customers are most likely use MS office, and your programming work with Office alternates will not able to use in their environment. I believe Office 365 Home is the cheapest solution.

[Asgard25]

Used OpenOffice for many years, actually still have it installed on my personal laptop. Works just great:thumbsup:

[Member 10707677]

I used to use OpenOffice, but Oracle stuffed it up. I've since changed to LibreOffice for PC and Kingsoft WPS for tablet. Navigating tables within word documents has a few odd quirks within LibreOffice, but they are easily dealt with. I deal with documents of a sensitive nature and have limited resources, so web-based and Office365 are off the table.

[Nagy Vilmos]

Go for LibreOffice.

[JeremyBob]

Basically it all depends on how advanced a user you are, and what your requirements are. Personally I find LibreOffice is more than up to the task for my needs. I prefer it to OpenOffice for personal reasons. If your requirements are more basic, I recommend Google Docs. The collaboration and sharing features are excellent, and its always nice having cloud access to your stuff when you are out of home/office. On top of which you can access and use it on your phone if necessary. I use GoogleDocs for most of my needs, and keep Libre around, just in case there is a new docx/xlsx from a client that I need to open, and docs is on the fritz.

[Anna Jayne Metcalfe]

Ditto, though I've found Publisher and Outlook hard to leave behind.

Anna :rose: Tech Blog | Visual Lint "Why would anyone prefer to wield a weapon that takes both hands at once, when they could use a lighter (and obviously superior) weapon that allows you to wield multiple ones at a time, and thus supports multi-paradigm carnage?"

[rwlpf]

I know everyone has supplied an opinion so l thought l would join in. :) If just need the basics nothing fancy such as creating macros get either google docs or office online l use what's built into onedrive.com. Both do the basics and if your client has internet connection can easily collaborate with your client by sharing the document. Or download document and email. Need a little more? then Librie Office is good can open and save microsoft formats. Ohh and its free you can get hold of a portable version at portableapps.com as well. Its not quite the same as MS Office however it can do 99% of the things you might want to do. HTH

[Dinesh V Kumar]

I have used Open Office and Kingsoft Office and I would suggest Kingsoft Office as majority of the features available in MS Office is available in Kingsoft Office.

[Slacker007]

Jeremy Falcon wrote:

but $200 for all the crap you can do with those two programs isn't that bad of a deal.

:thumbsup:

[Simon ORiordan from UK]

Libre Office. Open office was 'bought' by Oracle via Sun; last time I looked at it, it was obsolete and virtually unmaintained, although it went to Apache Foundation in 2011 and they may be maintaining it more actively. When Oracle took over, the developers promptly left (so that all they had was a collection of unmaintained and obsoleting code), and started LibreOffice. Not being sure, I would compare Libre and Open. I use Libre on my personal boxes, it handles practically any MS file type, including 2010 Docx made with Templates, although there are some macro compatibility issues at deeper levels with Excel. This means that if your xls projects are complex, some parts won't automate in Libre. I would recommend it; I last looked at oo in 2012 and it was pretty poor, although as I said, Apache now has it.