Office Alternatives update

Things go much faster on the web and this can be clearly seen in some recent developments regarding alternatives to Microsoft Office.

Google has added to its Google Documents portfolio, by adding Google Presentations to the mix. It now offers free alternatives to word, Excel and Powerpoint. All it needs is a gmail account.

IBM Have entered the field and are offering a free office suite, called Lotus Symphony. The package includes a word processor, a spreadsheet program and a presentation builder.

Adobe have entered into the fray and have purchased the very impressive looking Buzzword. Once again it’s free to use.

What’s Microsoft doing in the face of all this activity? Its answer is to make Microsoft Works free to download. This hasn’t happened yet, but is this enough of a response from the current leaders in this area?

Diarmuid

Google Software Pack

Google is no longer happy just to find the answers to any question that you might have. It now has interests in video, photos, blogging, 3d Modelling, geography and email. To help people it also offers a free software pack which in their words is to help you ‘Get the most out of your PC’.

The pack gathers some of the usual suspects in free software, such as Adobe Reader, Google Earth and skype, but also includes a fully functional Microsoft Office alternative in StarOffice.

Most of these you can find freely available on the web, but its nice to have them all collected together in one place. Google recommends that you have broadband if you are going to install starOffice.

Diarmuid

Free ‘office’ from your computer

Tired of being tied to one computer in order to write your documents or create your spreadsheets? Keep losing your USB key with all your files on them as you move from computer to computer? These days you can do quite a lot of the basic word processing and spreadsheet work using web based services.

Zoho is a comprehensive online service that offers web based alternatives to Word, Excel, Powerpoint, with a variety of other services offered as well. Most of these servcies are offered free, but some of the more advanced services may have a cost associated with them.

Google Documents is another alternative which offers you access to a spreadsheet and word processing service. This has the resources of Google behind it and the development of Google Gears means that it is only a matter of time before this will be a service that you will be able to use when you are not connected to the web as well.

Thinkfree also offers a range of web based office alternative services. Word, Excel and PowerPoint clones are all available free for use.

While none of these products offer the same functionality as Microsoft Office, they are are more than capable of doing the basic jobs that most people do everyday. They all allow you to keep your documents in one place online, so it doesn’t really matter what computer you use, as long as it is connected to the web, and with Google Gears just after being introduced, even that will not be a prerequisite in the future. Their documents are usually Microsoft Office compatible. Considering that these are very new services, they can only get more powerful and sophisticated.

Diarmuid