Jul
12
2008
Microsoft Office is known as the premier Office Suite application, it has hundreds of really cool features–that you will never use. So, why pay for Mercedes when all you need is Chevy? Below are three applications that may meet your needs, and best of all, they are all free.
OpenOffice. Open Office is a full featured office suite that includes a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation application, database, and drawing application. I terms of features its nearly on par with Microsoft’s offerings. Its about 80% compatible with Microsoft Office so you can read and create documents that can be shared. Open office is pretty easy to learn if you are familiar with Office 2003. I use Open Office and I have yet to come across a situation where I couldn’t read document from a Microsoft app or save a compatible one.
Google Documents. Google documents is a web based suite of basic office applications that you can run from almost any web enabled computer. It includes a word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation application. Google Document isn’t as full featured as OpenOffice or Microsoft Office, but its fully capable of most basic word processing and spreadsheet operations. Its easy to use, but since it web based it does take some getting used to compared to the PC installed applications. It can read and create MS office compatible docs, but is more limited than Open office as to the features that it can read.
Zoho. Zoho is an interesting suite of office products. It includes a word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation application and more. They also have a planner application, note application, a wiki, and quite a few trial versions of other business applications. I have not worked much with this application but it I have seen good reviews of it, and it is certainly worth looking at.
Remember that with any web based application, you won’t have access to you documents if you don’t have Internet access, and if there is a problem with the provider, you could loose some or all of your work, so back up your documents locally from time to time. (Make sure you also have a system to backup your documents on your PC as well)
