Office Roundup!

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.

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Tags: Buzzword, Google Docs, MSOffice, NeoOffice, StarOffice, Zoho

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 5th, 2008 at 2:56 pm and is filed under Microsoft, Windows.

13 Comments for “Office Roundup!”

mh Says:

I use ThinkFree.

It’s good to syncronize documents online and offline env.

I like it.

Posted August 5th, 2008 at 9:15 pm

Michael Swanberg Says:

Why do you use ThinkFree over the others? I agree that offline editing can be very important, especially to anyone who travels and wants to edit their docs while in-flight.

But Google Docs and Zoho also allow offline editing, albeit I think the ThinkFree’s system (even though it’s far from being actually free) is somewhat more robust.

I also found ThinkFree to be very full-featured, but at the same time difficult to set up and use. It also seems to be unfriendly toward Firefox users on Macs.

So let me know what it is about ThinkFree that makes it your favorite. I’m interested to know.

-Mike

Posted August 5th, 2008 at 10:23 pm

Michael Swanberg Says:

Well, my apologies… I just tried ThinkFree on Firefox 3.0.1 under Leopard and it worked just fine. Must have been something in my old Tiger setup.

-Mike

Posted August 5th, 2008 at 10:29 pm

mh Says:

Actually initial setup is needed.
But initial setup is only one time action. After that I can use strong feature of office functionality on and offline.

And updated document is synconized to online.
So i can access updated documents anywhere.
And i can share it with my co-worker.

That’s one of good reason for me to use ThinkFree.

Posted August 6th, 2008 at 10:52 pm

Michael Swanberg Says:

I assume you are referring to the initial download of the JAR for the JVM. Yes, that is required to use ThinkFree. However, I was having troubles getting past the certificate authentication before. It seems to work fine now. Still slow to start up, though.

But I think you missed my question. Offline is indeed a good thing, but Zoho and Google Docs also do the offline editing thing, via Google Gears. And OpenOffice.org is all offline (although there is no online component). So that’s not a true reason for choosing ThinkFree over the other two online services.

So, my question was, what makes you feel that ThinkFree is better? Or did you just not realize that the others also had offline editing?

Also, isn’t ThinkFree’s offline editor like $50?

-Mike

Posted August 7th, 2008 at 8:37 am

mh Says:

I use ThinkFree’s offline office for free.
Even though there is Ad section.

And ThinkFree’s office is more powerful than other tools.
So i can communicate documents to others who use MS office easily.

Posted August 7th, 2008 at 9:13 pm

Michael Swanberg Says:

Fair enough. I agree that there seems to be a lot more tools available in ThinkFree than the others.

So, the offline aspect to ThinkFree doesn’t have to cost $$? There’s a free (ad-supported) version? Cool.

I may just have to give ThinkFree another go ’round.

-Mike

Posted August 7th, 2008 at 9:15 pm

manpan Says:

I use Microsoft Office for both Windows and Mac when I have to. Otherwise I will use Open Office in both Mac/Windows environments (the equivalent of Open Office I use on Mac is NeoOffice — it also works with ODF files like Open Office) and sometimes on the Mac I use Apple’s iWork 08 and enjoy the templates for Pages, Numbers (spreadsheets, charts, graphs) and Keynote for presentations, word processing (Pages).

Posted August 9th, 2008 at 1:50 pm

Michael Swanberg Says:

Wow! You’re kind of all over the map, aren’t you? Do you use any online document creators, such as Google Docs?

BTW, NeoOffice IS OpenOffice. It’s a port that specifically set up for Mac.

-Mike

Posted August 11th, 2008 at 7:43 am

manpan Says:

Yes I have used Google Documents and I like it. In Windows I use Open Office, and on Mac sometimes as I mentioned I use the Mac equivalent of that called NeoOffice. As you say NeoOffice is a port of OpenOffice for Mac — I use both the Windows version titled OpenOffice and the NeoOffice suite for Mac every so often.

Posted August 11th, 2008 at 6:57 pm

manpan Says:

I just wanted to add that I read yesterday iTunes movie rentals have come to the Australian and New Zealand iTunes Stores and their the viewing limit once you begin a movie is 48 hours not the 24 hour limit here in U.S. They extended it for New Zealanders and Australians. Also they have the 30 days to start watching it like here.

Posted August 14th, 2008 at 1:28 pm

CW Says:

MS Office is the Clubber Lang of the software world “I can’t be beat and I won’t be beat.”

Hmmm… I wonder if I’m showing my age yet…

Posted August 15th, 2008 at 9:42 am

Michael Swanberg Says:

But hey, even Microsoft is gambling on online software, from Office ($70 a year, last I heard) to Windows (codename Midori).

-Mike

Posted August 15th, 2008 at 9:52 am

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