|
WHEN you
write a letter, term paper or newspaper column, you’ll
probably use Microsoft Word. Buffing up a balance sheet?
You’ll probably use Microsoft Excel. Nodding off during
a mind-numbing presentation? You’re a victim of
Microsoft PowerPoint.
These
are the building blocks of Microsoft Office, the
company’s flagship productivity suite and 800-pound
gorilla of the business and academic world. Whether
you’re a Windows or Mac user, you’ve probably paid the
Microsoft Office toll—more than once.
Today,
however, some powerful challengers are chipping away at
the Office edifice. They have significant outside
backing, they’re compatible with Office documents and,
best of all, they’re free—something that Office is
definitely not.
The
oldest challenger to Microsoft is OpenOffice.org, which
for obscure trademark reasons is the name of both the
software and the Web site where you’ll find it.
Born as
StarOffice in a brief commercial incarnation, the suite
was eventually acquired by Sun Microsystems, which
declared it an open source project. That made the
programming code available to everyone. The OpenOffice
suite is now supported by teams of volunteers who give
it away online (although you’re free to make a donation
to the cause).
Just
remember that the word “volunteer” doesn’t mean
“amateur.” Most of the volunteers who support OpenOffice
are talented professionals who donate their time and
skill for the technical challenge and a chance to make a
contribution to the community. Most also have a healthy
dislike for Microsoft Corp.
Whatever
their motivation, OpenOffice is a well-executed suite of
programs that can handle 99 percent of the chores that
most people do with their Microsoft counterparts.
Because it includes a database, OpenOffice is the most
comprehensive of the free alternatives. And it’s truly
cross-platform—available for computers running the
Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and Solaris operating systems.
Although
it was unveiled just last week, the beta version of
International Business Machines Corp.’s Lotus Symphony
looks just as capable as OpenOffice at first glance.
That shouldn’t be surprising, because it’s based on the
same open source code.
If
you’ve been around long enough, you’ll remember the
Symphony name from a DOS-based integrated suite that
Lotus Development Corp. published back in 1984, before
IBM acquired the company. The new version—which shares
only the name—is available for Windows and Linux
systems, with a Mac version planned for the future.
I don’t
have space to review both software suites here. Suffice
it to say that they look and work enough like their
Microsoft counterparts—or they did before the
controversial Office 2007 makeover—that you’ll be able
to figure them out quickly.
IBM’s
interface, executed in shades of the traditional Big
Blue, is a bit less confusing and more buttoned down
than OpenOffice, but this is strictly a matter of taste.
See for yourself—the only caveat is that both are
100-megabyte-plus downloads. If you don’t have a
broadband connection, you can order a CD online. Or get
a friend who has broadband to download it for you and
burn it to a CD or flash drive.
In my
trials I couldn’t find a Microsoft-created word
processing job, spreadsheet or presentation on my hard
drive that wouldn’t load into its OpenOffice or Symphony
counterpart—although I did spot a few minor formatting
problems.
Also,
none of my documents required Microsoft’s internal macro
programming language for automated tasks. If your
company documents do, test OpenOffice or Symphony
carefully before committing time-critical documents to
their care. If a glitch costs a couple of hours of your
valuable time, free software can turn out to be very
expensive.
This
brings up another technical issue—file formats. These
are the coding schemes that programmers use to store
documents. If you’re creating documents strictly for
your own use, this isn’t important. But the moment you
share the electronic versions with other folks, you’ll
have to pay attention to this issue.
OpenOffice and Symphony are compatible with the
OpenDocument format (ODf), an industry standard that
allows programs from different developers to read each
other’s documents and preserve typefaces, paragraphs,
indents, tabs, bullets, numbering and so forth.
Both
free suites also support the proprietary but
widely-copied formats that Microsoft used in its basic
Office products until the 2007 version. Although Office
2007 programs can read and write traditional Office
formats, their native tongue is a new format that only
Microsoft has adopted so far.
For now,
the free, open source suites might have problems with
native Office 2007 documents. But I think experienced
Microsoft Office 2007 users will save documents in the
earlier formats anyway, just to keep things straight
with people who might have to read them with older
versions of the program.
In any
case, the overwhelming majority of Microsoft Office
users will be working with pre-2007 versions for years
to come. Heck, in our shop, we’re still using Office
97—that’s the clay tablet version.
If you
don’t create complex documents but do value portability
and collaboration, Google has taken a whole new approach
called Google Docs.
Instead
of downloading huge programs to your hard drive, Google
offers lightweight word processing, spreadsheet and
presentation programs that live in your Web browser.
You’ll see these types of schemes referred to as Web
2.0, the second generation of interactive Web
programming.
By
default, Google stores documents on its own servers, so
they’re available whenever you log on, no matter what
computer you’re using. More importantly, Google
encourages collaboration—you can easily share documents
with others, who can revise them online and share their
documents with you.
Google
Docs can export documents to your hard drive in Office
and ODFs, and the software can import most documents you
upload from your hard drive. But in its current test
phase, Google Docs are limited in size—in fact, I had to
scratch around to find a spreadsheet on my hard drive
that came in under its 500-kilobyte limit.
Although
it was fine at basic formatting, Google’s word processor
quickly got lost importing Word documents with more
sophisticated formatting—including several samples of
standard resumes.
If you
value collaboration and online storage over traditional
features, or you’re just looking for a cheap, efficient
way to write letters and reports, Google Docs may be for
you. But the applications aren’t as ready for prime time
as more traditional Office alternatives.
Finally,
a word about Office itself. Word, Excel and PowerPoint
are great programs. Nor is Microsoft particularly greedy
at the low end of the market. You can buy the Home and
Student Edition of Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint and
OneNote) for $150 and install it on up to three PCs.
That’s
$50 per license for excellent software—hardly an
outrageous sum. But if you have only one computer or
more than three, or you don’t want to spend anything at
all, the alternatives are worth a look.
For
OpenOffice, surf to www.openoffice.org
For Lotus Symphony, visit symphony.lotus.com
For Google Docs, visit docs.google.com |
