It's no secret that Microsoft dominates the productivity suite market, but that doesn't mean it's the only way to go. Corel, Sun Microsystems, Apple, IBM and others offer alternatives at a fraction of the price of Microsoft Office 2007. Corel WordPerfect Office X3 offers interface improvements and one-click PDF, HTML and XML publishing. The lesser-known StarOffice 8 provides basic productivity tools and throws in a couple of extras, such as a drawing program. OpenOffice 2 is the free version of StarOffice. And IBM just rolled out a free test version of its Windows- and Linux-compatible Lotus Symphony suite.
If you want access to productivity tools from anywhere with an internet connection, you can pick from online services including Google Docs & Spreadsheets — now with Presentations too — and its business-focused sibling, Google Apps Premier Edition; other products in this area include Zoho Office and the ThinkFree blend of desktop and web-based tools.
Although most of these tools let you save work in Microsoft's file formats, the introduction of new file types in Office 2007 complicated matters. Microsoft does not support the Open Document Format that the open-source community favours. However, Sun offers a free plug-in for Microsoft Office that enables you to save ODF files.
The indie suites also provide unique benefits. For example, Corel WordPerfect is the tool of choice for writers and lawyers who need more control over long documents. ThinkFree 3 may be handy for business travellers who want to tweak a document using only a Java-enabled web browser. Zoho is the only browser-based service that directly plugs into Microsoft Office applications to store work both on the user's hard drive and on Zoho's servers. Among the desktop programs, however, only iWork, Microsoft Office, ThinkFree and OpenOffice work with Macs. Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac is expected to be released next year.
So which to choose? To help get you started, check out the tables on the following page.
Talkback
Quite how OpenOffice scored lower than StarOffice is strange given that they are, for all intents and purposes, *exactly* the same.
Note Reader's gave OpenOffice 8.8.
Sun recently released StarOffice as part of Google Apps - admission, it would seem, of its lack of market penetration compared to OpenOffice.
Thanks for those comments,
Readers' ratings are really valuable - in fact it could be argued that they are the only ratings that really count. We pride ourselves here on the thoroughness of our reviews but we can only go so far.
To really get an accurate picture of how a product stands-up to businesss use - we need the community to provide us with as much feedback as possible. That is a lot of the reason behind why we have made the changes we have to ZDNet.co.uk - to break-down the barriers between journalists and readers and allow people with information and opinions to communicate with each other.
The whole StarOffice, OpenOffice debate is interesting - think Novell are also launching their own flavour and will be interesting to see how that tastes given their tie-up with Microsoft.
eDeskOnline has all that Google DeskTop or Zoho has, plus an accounting and inventory element. Thats why my clients and myself have been using it for two years. Suggest a look at it.
Change the Title to "Why Use Microsoft Office"
Based on readers reviews, high cost, speed (unless you buy the latest PC every 2 years), slow bugs fixs & prone to virus attack, why use Microsoft Office?
Right now Microsoft are ahead maybe because they've had over 10 years to perfect their Office suite. now, the internet makes it possible for competitors to operate at low budgets.
Right now Microsoft can afford to charge us close to £500 for a disc, who'll pay that in the future when you can get Open Office and others for free?
Let's not forget how Microsoft Word achieved dominance over the previous market leader WordPerfect: Microsoft bundled Word with sales of Windows, and prevented OEMs from doing the same with WordPerfect.
http://www.news.com/Novell-sues-Microsoft-for-sinking-WordPerfect/2100-1012_3-5450285.html
Nice.