MS Office Alternatives

[JeremyL]

Can someone give me a list of MS Office alternatives for the WinXP platform and make some recomendations? I know about StarOffice. Any others?

[mavherick]

I've heard of Open Office, looks decent, but I've never tried it myself. It's free, give it a try!

mavherick

[littleman]

Yeah, go grab OpenOffice.

[troels nybo nielsen]

You also might try Corel Wordperfect.

[gsx]

Office suite by software602. Free download. Almost same as MS products (menus in same place for almost every option). Saves and loads as MS Office files, but only includes wordprocessor & spreadsheet (& photo editor). Good value for money though ;)

[rcjordan]

I've always used Xcel for building and handling large flatfiles used in my online projects. While I don't need much in the way of calculations, I do need a lot of columns and rows. Besides that, and a point where less robust spreadsheets fail, I sometimes need to drop 30k of text in a single cell. Based on my experience with the last free version of StarOffice (ver5, I think) which had, IMO, one of the worst UI's in the history of software, I was staying away from OpenOffice. Last week, Drastic told me that I should give OpenOffice a try, that he was very impressed with the latest release. There's a site that will burn and ship (US only?) a CD for $5, so I ordered that. CD came fine, setup ran fine, AND the UI is fine. I did a quick test of the 30k drop in the spreadsheet, that seemed to work. I've only briefly checked a few menus in the word processor. Though I didn't see the envelope addressing utility, there looks to be far more .doc functionality than I'll ever use.

[electro]

Big recommendation for OpenOffice.org, works really well, FREE, looks like it's going to keep on improving, available for almost every computer platform that is in existance, deals really well with opening and saving the dreaded .doc document.

[4serendipity]

I'd also recommend OpenOffice. It become more an d more stable with each release.

[4serendipity]

Also, if you just need a Word replacement I'd look into ABI Word.

[Robert Charlton]

rc - That's very encouraging news. What about compatibility btwn OpenOffice and MS Office? I was working on a project recently where, with Word 97, I couldn't open one of the Word docs they sent me. Fortunately, someone else on the project couldn't open it either, so I wasn't the odd man out. But I'd hate to be the guy who slows down a project because I'm not using the de facto standard.

Aside from macro compatibility, which I understand isn't there, how compatible is OpenOffice... both with reading files and creating files?

[jeremy goodrich]

Ditto the Open Office. A friend who uses linux convinced me to install, and it works quite well.

I've opened many different MS docs, and they've all opened / saved / changed just fine.

UI is nice enough, like rcj said, so many features I'll probably never use. :)

[Italy]

some recomendations? OpenOffice!
I use it on win xp and it's fantastic, stable & free!
It's also compatible with M$ Office.
Instead of Access, I use another good freeware: Munin

[rcjordan]

> What about compatibility btwn OpenOffice and MS Office?

So far, it's opened all (4 or 5 tried, I don't have many) the prior and current doc files I've tried, so I believe it would keep you from being odd-man-out. Calc opened the one Xcel file I tried just fine, too.

[Robert Charlton]

Is there anything about StarOffice that makes it preferable to OpenOffice? They don't really spell out the differences between the two products.

[justa]

We've been testing StarOffice on a few PC's here and have had a couple of problems with installs.

I've used both open and star, and I haven't functionally found anything which puts the other ahead, but price wise OpenOffice is the way to go.

I remember reading somewhere that if you embed an object in OpenOffice, then reopen in MS Word the embeded object is gone. Works fine the otherway around though.

[littleman]

I remember reading that StarOffice has a Sun owned SQL type database built into it's spell check, where OpenOffice uses an open source alternative -- a trivial difference.

[dingman]

(StarOffice :: OpenOffice) = (Netscape :: Mozilla)

I believe Sun throws in a few more format import/export filters, including a Flash export for the presentation tool?

[wwws.sun.com...]