Office Alternatives

September 13th, 2004 | by fish |

Being a Student, I can’t afford to go splashing out on expensive business software to Word Process my homework. I’d need to save up for at least 3 months to get enough even for the most basic version of Microsoft(c) Word and Excel, why which time I wouldn’t need it any more because I would have been thrown off the course. So, I decided to go on a hunt for cheap or free Office software. And anything that helps me release the tyrannous grip of Microsoft on my desktop is a good thing.

The candidates are …
AbiWord - A free (open-source) text processor, ported from Linux to Windows.
OpenOffice.org - The open-source sibling of StarOffice, this is probably the first real alternative open-source office suite that ever made the limelight (so to speak).
602PC Suite - Free for non-commercial use. Fully featured office suite complete with image editor.

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  1. 12 Responses to “Office Alternatives”

  2. bigbazza on Sep 13, 2004 | Reply

    Hi, Goldy. Try Open Office at http://tinyurl.com/kodg. You can probably get a copy on the CD’s from PC Utilities or PC Utilities+ in the UK. Bazza

  3. Jeremy on Sep 27, 2004 | Reply

    Excellent review =)

  4. Seyed on Sep 27, 2004 | Reply

    Yeah, but still, the Best Is Microsoft Office :)
    Response from Goldfish - Perhaps… perhaps not!

  5. Goldfish on Sep 27, 2004 | Reply

    Unfortunatley, this is for the most part true. However the “lack” of features helps in some cases. e.g. the Help Assistant. I hate that damn thing!!!

  6. Irritating Proofreader on Sep 27, 2004 | Reply

    Great idea for a review. Unfortunately no matter how good a word processing program is, free or not, it cannot help someone who is not a writer to post a well-written article. The internet is great, but it is killing the English language!

    Response from Goldfish - O…kay…..

  7. Darryl on Sep 27, 2004 | Reply

    Great review. I have never tried any of these progs… needless to say i will now give them a look.. thanks

  8. Don Scala on Sep 27, 2004 | Reply

    thanks for posting your work on these word processing pgm.’s here — I found them interesting and useful.

    for my purposes, having the latest complete Office 2003, I find Abiword most useful, as I really dislike having to deal will all the crap in the m.$. pgm.’s, but need to use them to open my students’ {university} documents. — I like AbiWord for its simplicity when I wish to make a small text document, yet have ‘WORD’ able to read it as a ‘.doc’ or ‘.rtf’ file, and I need spell check, as I can spell, but cannot type {made 6 corrections here already}

    regards,
    Don Scala

  9. Tyger Claw on Sep 28, 2004 | Reply

    Used OpenOffice.org and also AbilityOffice (Also Free). I’m currently working on a “free” section on my site, which will include both mentioned, as well as those above. While free is nice… $10CA is better for WordPerfect 10 off eBay! =)

  10. Loren on Sep 28, 2004 | Reply

    I am pretty sure you can customize the menu bars, so you can select color for icons, and not to show gradient color for bars. It has been a long time since I have used 602 software. I do like Lotus 1-2-3 for spreadsheets. I may try OpenOffice some day, just for the heck of it.

  11. Jim on Sep 28, 2004 | Reply

    StarOffice 7 from Sun is also free for Educational use and is available for download on their website

  12. Ian on Oct 6, 2004 | Reply

    The major open-source projects are not developed in the haphazard way you describe. There are many that do function on a purely ad hoc basis, but things like OpenOffice are formalised, having clear feature goals and control of the implementation of those features.

    Response from Goldfish : I agree that the major-open source initatives are much more organised than the smaller projects, but the fact still remains that human resource management is quite severly restricted by the concept of Open Source coding. People describe Open Source developers are hobbyists, which I would not agree with - open source developers take their work very seriously, because of this.

  13. Eric06 on Oct 17, 2004 | Reply

    very good write up, i see you as a critque later in life. great job!

    Eric

    Response from Goldfish - Cheers dude :)

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