Discussion on:

Five alternatives to Microsoft Office

The past few weeks we have been discussing Office 2013, the licensing scheme implemented by Microsoft, and its impact on decision makers. Are you actively testing alternatives to Office?

We have about 5000 desktops and are actively testing MS Office alternatives.
MS have priced themselves out of the market. As far as the cloud is concerned, in Australia you are not always afforded a fast and reliable internet connection. Makes working "on the road" sum what impossible.

In infrastructure and training costs to switch!
That and plenty of users who will grumbled because of the change. I know plenty of people who live by Outlook - akin to an Apple fanboi loving his new iPhone.

It's management you have to convince.

Microsoft Office online is way behind Google Docs in the sense of feel, responsiveness and stability.

Microsoft Office does, however, provide an option of opening the file for editing in the browser or in a local installed Office 2007 or better. Handy for those times you need the more powerful features not available over the web.

Our choice is...
1) Google Docs
2) Libra Office
Depending where we are and what O/S we are using.....
Google Docs if we are accessing from a windows 7 machine
Libra Office if we are accessing from a Linix machine (we use ZORIN 6 Ult)

Company users were asked if they want WIN8 and Office 2013 ( we trailed for one month) ANSWER NO No no.......

So Microsoft you have your answer sorry we will NOT be using WIN8 and/or Office 2013.

It would be great if the authors of articles on this topic told us whether the products are able to work with ALL Excel and Word files. Specifically, do they run VBA code in Office files? This is a show stopper for me and I suspect a lot of others.

Just a thought. Maybe a feature comparison would be good.

I'll second your request.

Also add that knowing the degree of interoperability would be helpful. Not everything needs to work, just enough to get the job done.

I've used LibreOffice/OpenOffice for years and have created solutions in their native format then, when done, saved as Excel to provide the solution to the final user.

So far I've been able to provide solutions to all the problems I've been asked to solve. A few times I've had to find other functions than the ones I started with because they didn't produce the same result in Excel.

Now that's just formulas not VBA but the same applies. LibreOffice is supposed to run VBA macros but, of course, not supporting all features. Would be nice to have a resource that identifies what does and doesn't translate.

I posed this question on the discussion for Office licensing and someone suggested Thunderbird, then a couple of others said that were some serious show stoppers with it.

My question to the moderator (and everyone else for that matter) is this:

Is there ANY FOSS PIM's out there (other than T-Bird) since none of these "Suites" have a PIM as a part there of, that's as easy to use as Outlook, and can import (and export emails with ease?

Could the moderator (or any one else) please respond, and maybe do an article if there happens to be a few of them?

Thanks very much and have a wonderful day

we are looking for this exact thing. Will post what we com up with...

If you already own Office 2007, why would you switch to any of these alternatives? If you want to do the same thing you did yesterday, stay with the software you bought yesterday.

I have sharepoint and 100 users. I have people who want to work on the same file, at the same time. Some of my users are on campus, and some are in the field. My Exchange server is also 5 years old.

The last time I licensed Office, it was $96k, I have an Exchange project thats $16k. I have Trend Micro for Exchange thats $1k/yr. Symantec backup for exhchange, power, air conditioning.. another $2k/yr. My SAN is also full, so add in another $15k for storage.

Its $24k/year to license my 100 users for Office Pro, Exchange, Lync, and 1.5TB of space. How is this not saving me money?

Plus, specing, ordering, installing or managing servers doesn't add to your companies bottom line.

One of the cool benifits of the new Office is that I get it at home for free.

SEems that on a quiet news week, TR digs out some old articles, changes the title and a few line and some of the article and sends it out again.

This has the full set of functions and supports all the Microsoft file formats. http://www.freeoffice.com/en/

We use Google docs here along with MS Office 2010 and while Google docs is getting more robust and adding more features, etc, nothing comes close to Office 2010 yet in terms of user friendliness and full services. It's sad but true. I think Microsoft has been humbled enough in the last few years to know that and are quietly making amends to win back users and get a better public opinion.

I like LibreOffice, but there are things you just can't do. Like, in one portion of a Word document, I have something from Visio. That works great in Office. When I try to open that Office document in LibreOffice, the Visio portion is just empty space. I'm sure there are many other specialized things that are incompatible with LibreOffice. I also use Access at home extensively and know it well...I never really got anywhere with the OpenOffice database. Perhaps it is wonderful, but it isn't intuitive for me. Office is still really the best. But for occasional use...especially on a budget, it's hard to beat the price and capability of LibreOffice. If I didn't already have Office at home, I wouldn't buy it now. And although many of our users at work could probably get by with LibreOffice, there is always the problem of receiving Office documents from larger companies. They do things with some of those spreadsheets that make it impossible not to have Excel. I do think that home use is a great niche for LibreOffice.

LibreOffice and OpenOffice both use The Document Foundation's document formats. The document formats aren't OpenOffice or LibreOffice formats.

Other programs also support the The Document Foundation's document formats.

The idea is the content of the document is your IP, the document format is open source, you don't need to rely on a particular vendor providing an app to maintain access to your IP and if you don't have an app you can always read the document directly.

Yes, just like mounting a secondary Operating System, a secondary Office Suite is a necessary part of your basic backup and recovery plan. A simple, but very effective plan is to mount UBUNTU Linux in a separate partition on your Hard Drive. This OS includes Libre Office (Suite). I use both OS's and Office Suite's interchangeably.

For all the advances in the last 20 years I'm reminded of the student job I had at the univerisity I attended back in the 80's. MS O365 reminds me strongly of the network shared version of Wordperfect on Banyan Vines on a 10 meg network that I supported in the Law school except now the slow leg is the Internet and they want me to send 500 users on to an uncontrolled network (Our office internet pipe happens to be 10 meg) and expect decent performance with everything else that requires inet access.

I'm thinking probably not.

Are any of the alternative spreadsheets able to handle large files better than MS 2010 Office Professional? Up to 295,000 rows, 30 colums with calculations being performed and able to
have macros to perform some of the calculations/producing files?

How about 64 bit versions to run on 64 bit OS systems to take advantage more ram?

JD

needed in large corporations, or maybe not. The home user or small business has no need for it, as the free alternatives serve fine. Outlook has always been full of holes and impossible to use (for me anyway) and I just use web-based mail. A large corporation probably has their own server that has nothing to do with Outlook. A small company doesn't need it, and the home user certainly doesn't.
It's too complicated to use, and is too integrated with the ms Office suites to be of any use to anyone who doesn't use them. Office itself got much harder to use with the "ribbon" and I refuse to have any version newer than 2003, even with the "search" function. I heard somewhere that in 2013 you can turn off the stupid ribbon. IF that's true and I had any use for it, I might reconsider, IF ms would make it available for free, as are most other office applications. Why pay for something you won't use?

I use Office apps at home for all sorts of things. That includes automation using VBA. The idea that a "home user" is somehow less interested in these things is crazy. Not all home users, but certainly some of us. Stop putting people in boxes!

the insinuation here is that only the larger businesses would run in-house mailservers, whereas home users certainly wouldn't. And, to a point, I'll agree but add that every rule has its exceptions (I know of a fair few larger businesses in the local area here that use google apps for email, and I run a mailserver at home for the sole purpose of development with it)

the ribbon may be "stupid" and it took me a while to get my head around where MS have hidden various tools/utilities/functions within Office, but after long term use with it I haven't had many complaints about it since.

I bet you were of the same opinion with the UI change between Win 3.11 and Win95

I meant to say the full version, not the online thing. NO ONE is going to use an online server or application, nor store their data online. If you do you're just asking for trouble.

Libre Office "even" supports the Open Office document format?

The Open Document Format IS both the Libre Office AND Open Office primary / native document format, and both programs should support Microsoft Office formats equally well.

The Open Document Format is NOT just a Libre Office or Open Office format, it is the most prominent global open standard for these kind of documents.

In 2010 Sun was bought by Oracle and since Sun owned Open Office Oracle now had control. As expected Oracle's early moves were not appreciated by the open source community and Libre Office was forked (in other words Open Office was dumped).

In a move that certainly surprised me (I don't know if I'm the only one), Oracle donated Open Office to Apache Foundation in 2011. This move seems to have rescued Open Office from oblivion.

Now we have both Open Office and Libre Office, both originally the same, and I presume, unless someone can clarify, they are now both still fundamentally the same but presumably with growing differences.

MS Office is by far has the best features of all office suites. I'll use OpenOffice on my Linux machine, it does the job, but even Office 2002 has more features than any of the alternatives. Features like VBA scripting, better forms controls, drawing controls, larger set of Excel formulas, etc etc etc.
There is a reason back way during Office wars of the 1980s Microsoft prevailed, it was the feature set of Office. The alternatives are with us for one reason only, they cost nothing to license. I've tested OpenOffice with business users, it cannot do the job.

That said, its nice to have alternatives for the simple user who has no use of full features of Office. Until they have that need, which with time they will.

not only does that, *but* supports more than just BASIC: BasicMaker automates SoftMaker Office: it lets you write BASIC macros that complete recurring tasks in TextMaker and PlanMaker.
From the standpoint of syntax, BasicMaker is modeled after Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), and its OLE Automation object model is a subset of Microsoft Office's. If you already have experience in macro writing with Microsoft Office, you'll be up to speed with SoftMaker Office macros in no time at all.
If you wish to create scripts for SoftMaker Office in languages other than BASIC, you can! TextMaker and PlanMaker can be scripted in many programming languages, including as Python, Perl, Ruby, C++, and Delphi.

We work hard to make all of our documents accessible to people using screen readers and assistive technology. It would be nice to know which of these alternatives match (or exceed) MS Office's accessibility features.

Regarding compatibility to MSO formats, no other alternate office suite can challenge with SoftMaker Office. It's the only one to open, edit, and save MSO formats seamlessly. All others (and I tested a lot of them) create a lot of weird stuff. By the way, SoftMaker Ofice is faster and more reliable than others, especially Libre Office, that is pretty slow and has too many bugs. SoftMaker Office Professional comes with word processor TextMaker, spreadsheet PlanMaker, presentation software SoftMaker Presentations, BasicMaker, Berlitz dictionaries, and eM Client 5 Professional for just $99 for three licenses. This is the best competitor to MSO, but much cheaper. Btw, support is totally free.