Why cough up hun­dreds for Microsoft Office™ when there’s a cred­ible altern­at­ive for free?

I am writ­ing this blog post on a new laptop PC that I’ve had for a couple of months now. It came pre­loaded with a trial copy of Microsoft’s omni­po­tent 2007 Office™ suite of busi­ness applic­a­tions which includes the likes of Word™, Excel™ and Power­Point™ etc.

Great I thought! After all, like mil­lions of oth­ers; MS Office is my staple office applic­a­tion when it comes to word pro­cessing and spread­sheet work. I’ve used it for years and have the 2003 ver­sion installed on the 3 other PCs I have in my business.

How­ever, last week, the trial approached its end and the pres­sure moun­ted to react­iv­ate the product by pur­chas­ing an appro­pri­ate license.

So I was faced with a choice; do I spend sev­eral hun­dred quid on the cur­rent 2007 ver­sion, which accord­ing to Amazon, starts at a smidgen under £300 for the small busi­ness edi­tion. Or do I simply install another copy of Office 2003 for which I have sev­eral User licenses for?

Decision, Decisions…

A couple of my asso­ci­ates use Sun Microsystem’s Open­Of­fice as their busi­ness soft­ware suite of choice as an altern­at­ive to Microsoft’s Office. I’ve known about the product for years, so I decided to take the oppor­tun­ity and fol­low their lead by down­load­ing and using the application.

So there you have it. Decision made, whereupon I duly unin­stalled Office and down­loaded and ran, the 148Mb file needed for the install­a­tion of Open­Of­fice which is cur­rently on ver­sion 3.1.

Thank good­ness for broad­band that’s all I can say!

First Impres­sions

Open­Of­fice Dashboard

When Open­Of­fice first launches on your screen you’re faced with a dash­board which asks you to choose which applic­a­tion you want to use. The main ones may be described as:

• “Write” — word pro­cessing app equi­val­ent to MS Word
• “Calc” — spread­sheet app equi­val­ent to MS Excel
• “Impress” — present­a­tion app equi­val­ent to MS PowerPoint
• “Base” — data­base app equi­val­ent to MS Access

There’s no email cli­ent included in Open­Of­fice whereas MS Office has Out­look™. So dur­ing the down­load pro­cess Sun recom­mends using the freely avail­able Moz­illa Thun­der­bird if an email cli­ent is required. Thun­der­bird is made by the same people who pro­duce the Fire­fox web browser and is a power­ful email cli­ent so is worth invest­ig­at­ing par­tic­u­larly as it’s free whereas Out­look as a stand alone soft­ware pur­chase, is £115.

Tem­plates and Extensions

Along with the pro­gram list on the main Open­Of­fice screen, you’ll see icons for Tem­plates and Extensions.

Tem­plates are quite sim­ilar to the tem­plates you get in MS Office; they are pre­format­ted lay­outs and designs for vari­ous file types includ­ing everything from a basic CV out­line in Write to advanced budget cal­cu­lat­ors in Calc. New tem­plates may be down­loaded dir­ectly into Open­Of­fice from their web­site at OpenOffice.org

For people who are used to the exten­sions in the Fire­fox browser, Open­Of­fice exten­sions will seem very famil­iar. Exten­sions are soft­ware com­pon­ents that add sup­ple­ment­ary func­tion­al­ity to Open­Of­fice programs.

For example, Open­Of­fice fea­tures out-of-the-box PDF export cap­ab­il­ity (unlike MS Office), but Write can’t nat­ively import and edit PDF doc­u­ments. No prob­lem, there’s an Exten­sion for that, which allows you to per­form line-by-line edits of PDF files from OpenOffice’s Write.

Get­ting Stuck In

Once inside Open­Of­fice I found the inter­face look and feel, to be very sim­ilar to that of the MS Office 2003 ver­sion I’ve been using for a while. So the trans­ition was straight for­ward. How­ever for those used to MS Office 2007 with it’s annoy­ing Rib­bon menu bar, you’ll feel you’ve taken a step back­wards some­what. But don’t be put off.

One of the great things about Open­Of­fice is its abil­ity to open any MS Office file includ­ing Office 2007’s .docx Word documents.

So if any­one sends you a MS Office doc­u­ment but you don’t have the suite on your machine. You can still open and edit them regard­less without min­imal loss of format­ting although I noted it didn’t seem to like MS Word mac­ros sometimes.

Con­clu­sion

So hav­ing used Open­Of­fice for the best part of a week in place of MS Office (well cer­tainly on this new laptop any­way), would I recom­mend it as a cred­ible altern­at­ive to MS Office for the budget con­scious busi­ness owner?

The answer is a clear and resound­ing “yes”!

Pros

• It’s free and can be sup­ple­men­ted with loads of free add-ons (Exten­sions) and templates.
• Looks and works like MS Office includ­ing the same key­board shortcuts.
• Will open MS Office documents

Cons

• It doesn’t like MS Word macros
• No email cli­ent included
• It’s a big file to down­load (a prob­lem if you have a slow inter­net connection)

Down­load Open­Of­fice from here.

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