Stump the PC Club is a free tech-advice column written by members of the North Orange County Computer Club, which has been in existence since 1976. Visit the club’s site at noccc.org.
QUESTION: For those of us who do not want to pay for Microsoft Office or their upgrades what are the alternatives?
PC CLUB: Fortunately, there are several alternatives to Microsoft Office and a lot of them are free. One of the more popular ones is OpenOffice Suite which is available for free at www.openoffice.org. The current version, which is 3.3, includes a word processor, a spreadsheet program, a presentation program, a database management program and a vector graphics editor. You have a choice of installing all of the applications or just the ones that interest you.
The suite will open Word 2010 files in the new XML format but cannot save files in that format. I found it to be very compatible with Microsoft Office in most instances but a drawing that I created in Word 2010 did not work with OpenOffice. If you can do without the collaboration tools in Office 2010 and tolerate an occasional incompatibility, it’s a great alternative.
I also tried LibreOffice at http://www.libreoffice.org/ which also could not handle a Word document containing a drawing but did everything else well.
However, both OpenOffice and LibreOffice have the capability of creating a drawing in their graphics application. In fact, I found it very easy to create a drawing with either of these programs and then to copying it into a text document.
OpenOffice offers a portable version at http://bit.ly/V5Mx. This version allows you to carry the full program with you on your flash drive enabling you to open and edit documents anywhere.
Should you elect to install OpenOffice or LibreOffice they will include installing the Java Runtime. This means that you will subsequently be reminded to update your Java installation periodically. You should always allow this to happen since later versions are more secure. The major feature that is missing from OpenOffice and LibreOffice is collaboration. This is most useful if you are in an office environment and collaborating with others when creating documents.
If you are comfortable with preparing and storing documents online, Google Docs at https://docs.google.com/ and Zoho Suite at http://www.zoho.com/ are both fairly easy to use. You may have to sign up for these but it’s free. Both of these applications offer collaboration and the Zoho Suite appears to offer more applications.
You can read more about Microsoft Office alternatives at http://bit.ly/msalternatives.
Ed Schwartz is a member of the North Orange County Computer Club. To send in a question, go to edwardns.com and click the Contact Me menu. Archives of previous columns are also on the website.