August 5th, 2008
by Michael Swanberg
With many alternatives to Microsoft Office these days, one can pretty much throw Office to the curb for good. And many of the alternatives are free. Here’s a roundup of some that I’ve tried.
| ||||||||||
I am a hardcore geek programmer. As such, I do far more with Office than the average bear. I keep my budget in an Excel spreadsheet, and lately I have been looking for a better means of keeping it available to me, online. The obvious answer would be to upload it to one of several online document-editing suites; but the reality is that I use VBA (Visual BASIC for Applications) extensively in my budget spreadsheet, so it is very difficult to get it working with anything other than the true Microsoft Office. In fact, it even didn’t want to work properly in the Mac version of MSOffice. So, in the end, I decided to simply web-enable my budget, take it out of the realm of spreadsheets altogether, and be done with it. But in my travels, I’ve come across many Office alternatives.
First off, let’s look at some of the online office suites. Overall, there’s Google Docs, Zoho, and ThinkFree.
Let’s start off with the one I didn’t particularly like: ThinkFree (http://www.thinkfree.com). Overall, this is an excellent online (and largely free) suite of office applications. It’s extremely full-featured and very compatible with MSOffice. However, I had a lot of difficulty getting the suite to work, and it simply refused to work in Firefox on a Mac… at least for me. As well, it seems like the ThinkFree online office is just a way to pander to people to buy their offline suite — although offline editing is a definite plus. As well, the program is totally Java and takes a pretty long time to get up and running.
Second, there’s Zoho. I really like Zoho (http://www.zoho.com/). It’s just a good deal unstable. One thing that I have been looking for in an office suite is the ability to publish to my blog. This article itself is being written in Google Docs. More about this later, back to Zoho. Zoho actually has many online applications, not just word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation. In fact, I count 17 different online apps at the time of this writing. However, not all of them are 100% free. I strongly urge you to give Zoho a try if you’re looking to keep your documents online. Zoho also allows offline editing via Google Gears.
Google Docs is a staple among many of us. It is very stable and just seems to be light and airy in use. By that I mean that it doesn’t seem to be taxing my system or my browser to any great degree. As many know, Google Docs started out as Writely (in fact the Writely monniker can still be found in some of the nooks and crannies of the application) and the spreadsheet and presentation apps were added on. As such, the integration between them isn’t stellar. However, the folks at Google are always hard at work adding on to the suite. And for offline editing, Google offers Gears.
Finally, an application that many of you may not have heard of: Buzzword (https://buzzword.acrobat.com/). At this writing, Buzzword is only a word processor, and it is mainly just a showcase for Adobe’s new Air, which is a distributed computing system, similar to Flash and ActiveX, and what Java initially touted to be. It’s slick as snot, but more than a little unstable. I deleted a Page Break once and it crashed all of Internet Explorer. Obviously, using Buzzword requires the installation of Adobe Air, but I think that will be as ubiquitous as Flash in the coming future. And, since it’s an Adobe applet, it’s a snap to create PDFs from your documents.
As for editing blog entries, here’s what I’ve found. Of all of these, only Zoho and Google Docs are set up to publish articles directly to WordPress blogs. Google seems to be more integrated, allowing you to delete your blog post directly from Google Docs itself. However, for some reason, Google Docs refuses to add a title to the blog post. So you have to go into your blog dashboard and place the title manually.
Zoho, on the other hand, will do the title thing. It will even do the tag thing, allowing you to tag your posts. And you can update your posts if you change your document. But for some reason, you have to delete the post, should you need to, from your blog interface. And then Zoho still thinks it’s out there, but you can post it as a new article if you wish.
As well, both Google Docs and Zoho seem to be a little fishy in formatting paragraph breaks and such. Check out my previous post (http://www.dailyindia.com/blog/121129111.php/the-knight-is-darkest) to see how Zoho places wide spaces between my paragraphs. Time will only see what Google Docs will do to this article.
Moving into the realm of offline applications, there is OpenOffice.org and a few others. I say it that way because there really aren’t any others. And some are even just versions of OpenOffice. I personally use NeoOffice on my Macbook at home, which is a version of OpenOffice that’s been tweaked for Mac use. It will even bring in VBA macros, although any use of ActiveX calls don’t port. You have to rewrite your macros to take advantage of anything like this. So if you, say, hook into Internet Explorer to get data off the web, it won’t work in NeoOffice. And this pretty much goes for all of the non-Microsoft office suites that attempt to have macro support. Zoho goes so far as to call their macro part “VBA Editor,” but it’s still not 100% as full-featured as the real VBA. I have to say, that’s one thing that Microsoft definitely did well.
Some other offline alternatives are Bean (Mac only: http://www.bean-osx.com/Bean.html), and AbiWord (Windows, Mac, and Linux: http://www.abisource.com/screenshots/), which are word processors only. Sorry, no spreadsheets or other stuff.
StarOffice from Sun is still listed as free in some searches, but it appears as though it is now $69.95. Still far better than MSOffice’s $400 price tag, but hardly worth it when there are such great free alternatives.
In the end, each of us need to focus on our particular needs in the office suite arena. Since I use every bit of MSOffice’s power, I am having a difficult time finding a good alternative. However, for basic needs, there are many great places to go to be able to edit spreadsheets and other documents, online and offline.
Let me know your thoughts. Did I miss an obvious alternative? Do you have a favorite? Post a comment and let me know. As well, if any of you know any better ways to post entries to WordPress-type blogs, I’m all ears. I do have the iPhone WordPress app, but of course it’s difficult to create a lengthy article on that platform.
Tags: Buzzword, Google Docs, MSOffice, NeoOffice, StarOffice, Zoho
Related Posts on This Topic:
No related posts
