Everyone will need to have a full office suite sometime in their life. Whether you use it on a daily basis for school, work, pleasure, or use it once a year it's hard to fork out over $500 for Microsoft Office. Yeah, you could go with the Microsoft "Works" but it is the lamest piece of word processing software I was ever forced to use! I personally skip the commercial software and go open source.
Free. That's enough to get my attention, but when you add quality, usability, and compatibility to it I start to drool. Openoffice is one of the greatest pieces of software that I have had the pleasure to use. The suite includes a word processor, spreadsheet application, presentation similar to PowerPoint, and a drawing program. It is cross-platform, compatible with Microsoft Word, and able to do anything that an expensive word processor should do. I use a Mac at work. Macs don't come with a word processor and I needed to make up some reports. I was determined not to cave in and use a {shudder} Windows computer. I had heard of Openoffice when I was in college so I thought I would give it a go. After a short and easy install, I started it up and was amazed at its usability. Coming from a background of only using Office, I was afraid that I would struggle to get used to the new format, this was not the case at all. The interface is very similar to Office and all of your old Office docs are compatible with it.
The one down side to Openoffice is that it is a very large program (over 100 mb). On slow connection this could take several hours to download, on dial up it could take several days. For those of you who need a word processor before next week and are on dialup you should consider Abiword. Abiword is just over 5 mb (that shouldn't be more than an hour for you dial up people). It is very cpu friendly and will preform nearly anything you throw at it. I have it installed on several of my computers, including a 133mhz laptop. I have never found a computer that it will not run on.
If you are on a Mac and don't like having to deal with the X11 environment and need more functionality than Abiword, there is hope for you. Check out Bean. No longer just the musical fruit, Bean is a very OS X kind of program. (For those of you who have never used a Mac, just trust me on this) The interface looks very simple with a kind of iWeb thing going on. It is less than a megabyte and has a easy drag and drop install. There is also for Macs a program called NeoOffice. It is a full office suit and is native to the OS X environment. (which means you won't have to use the X11 environment) The suite includes a word processor, spreadsheet application, presentation similar to PowerPoint, and a drawing program. It is 134 mb, so be prepared for a long download.
So the next time you get sick about putting out $500 for Microsoft Office and then selling your soul to activate it only to have to deal with security problems, check out these alternatives.
No comments:
Post a Comment