Alternatives to MS Office....OpenOffice?

SideWinder · 5 Mar 2014 at 20:28

As topic - still the best option?

d_brennen · 5 Mar 2014 at 20:29

I use LibreOffice a fair bit, no problems

Vimes · 5 Mar 2014 at 21:34

I use Kingsoft free office and it has a fancy ribbon, if that matters, by default and seems to offer the functionality that we need.

thenewoc · 5 Mar 2014 at 21:52

Google Apps

http://www.google.com/enterprise/apps/business/

Macro · 5 Mar 2014 at 21:58

Free Microsoft Office web apps (Office Online) - http://www.office.com

bledd · 5 Mar 2014 at 22:01

Office 365 is so cheap, it's criminal not to use it nowadays.

Caged · 5 Mar 2014 at 22:40

If you need to collaborate with other Office users, then Office is the best option.

If it's just for you then take your pick, I use the Apple suite personally.

thenewoc · 5 Mar 2014 at 22:48

bledd. said:
Office 365 is so cheap, it's criminal not to use it nowadays.

OP asked for alternatives to Office hence I didn't recommend but now that Google Apps isn't free, Office 365 does indeed offer a better value proposition.

theheyes · 6 Mar 2014 at 09:22

LibreOffice is probably the most comparable, but if you haven't tried Office Online it's worth a look.

unwashed potato! · 6 Mar 2014 at 17:53

bledd. said:
Office 365 is so cheap, it's criminal not to use it nowadays.

am i right in tihnking it's £80 per year? :eek:

linktoinsanity · 6 Mar 2014 at 18:08

Another vote for LibreOffice here.

melvis · 6 Mar 2014 at 18:59

libreoffice +1 here

opethdisciple · 6 Mar 2014 at 22:16

melvis said:
libreoffice +1 here

libreoffice +2 here

gpuerrilla · 6 Mar 2014 at 23:39

Recently converted libreoffice +3

rhysduck · 7 Mar 2014 at 00:03

http://portableapps.com/apps/office

Yes they are portable and it gives you in idea of whats out there (Libre / OpenOffice etc)

Illgresi · 7 Mar 2014 at 22:58

I use OpenOffice, and it's fine for me.

Any reason to switch to LibreOffice?

marc2003 · 7 Mar 2014 at 23:12

Illgresi said:
I use OpenOffice, and it's fine for me.

Any reason to switch to LibreOffice?

i think libre office is more actively developed now because all the people who used to work on open office left to go there. they weren't happy with how open office was managed.

edit: i should say i have no experience of using either. i'm just going off my fuzzy memory.

Orcvader · 7 Mar 2014 at 23:23

Wasn't there an article about the UK goverment moving to LibreOffice as well? Or was that the file format...

opethdisciple · 8 Mar 2014 at 00:46

Libre Office is the main open source word processing package out there.

All the devs moved over from Open office when Apache took over.

They didn’t like the way things where going so they branched off and created their own office. Thus Libre Office was born.

Rainmaker · 8 Mar 2014 at 04:24

opethdisciple said:
Libre Office is the main open source word processing package out there.

All the devs moved over from Open office when Apache took over.

They didn’t like the way things where going so they branched off and created their own office. Thus Libre Office was born.

It was Sun/Oracle not Apache. The devs didn't like Oracle's attitude to open source software, including their ongoing lawsuit against Google over Java in Android. Once the devs bailed and forked the code to form LibreOffice, Oracle realised they had a dead pony and donated the code to the Apache Foundation.