Better alternative to MS Office?

If you want something free and fairly basic then Open Office is an excellent alternative. I have it installed on both my PC, Laptop and on a flash drive for carrying around with me.
 
Whats not free and fairly basic but a lot better than MS Office? Or is Openoffice much better than MS Office?
 
MS Office is probably the "best" office suite in terms of functionality and support etc.

Open office is a good alternative although not as advanced as MS Office it'll do for most home users.

It all rather depends on what you mean by "best"
 
Thunderbird is free, so I say its better than outlook.

Same applies for the rest of the suite. If you just wanna do "normal" stuff then openoffice is best. I have never not been able to do something on openoffice, plus its legally free.
 
I wouldn't say it's a big resource hog. I've used 2007 and the latest open office. I prefer 2007 but I'm used to using it. Open office did everything I need though.
 
Oxy said:
Thunderbird is free, so I say its better than outlook.

Same applies for the rest of the suite. If you just wanna do "normal" stuff then openoffice is best. I have never not been able to do something on openoffice, plus its legally free.
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Are you being serious?! Outlook 2007 (or 2003 for that matter) is about 1 million light years better than Thunderbird....Thunderbird is a basic email client, Outlook is a fully blown email/work/will do your grocery shopping automaticaly heavyweight.

Same goes for Office 2003/2007. Then again, I speak from a corporate viewpoint.

Office 2007 is brilliant, especially with MOSS 3.0. To answer the OP post, there is no alternative, if you want the essentials, sure OpenOffice etc, but Office 2007/2003 is king of the hill from a corporate perspective anyway. Anyone who says otherwise is deluded.
 
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open office is great and has just as much functionality as Ms office. except maybe excel.

It's just something are in different places, so you need to look for them until you get used to it.

However due top file formats, some of the layout, borders, spaces etc may change when opened up in Openoffice (not always)
 
Hmmm, well I thought sod it and installed MS Office again :p.

I use thunderbird at the moment for email, I find Outlook is hard to set up for AOL and I could never get it to send emails :(
 
willhub said:
Hmmm, well I thought sod it and installed MS Office again :p.

I use thunderbird at the moment for email, I find Outlook is hard to set up for AOL and I could never get it to send emails :(
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Most of Outlook's functionality speeds ahead from Exchange based servers, with that it is in a world of its own.
 
willhub said:
From what based servers? So no use to me for checking my email with AOL I guess?
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I still think its better than Thunderbird etc without an Exchange server, integration with Office for one, AOL should work fine with Outlook, it's IMAP, you probably didn't enable authentication checking for the SMTP server.

Thunderbird to me is like Tesco Value, whilst Outlook is your Tesco Finest.
 
rafster said:
Are you being serious?! Outlook 2007 (or 2003 for that matter) is about 1 million light years better than Thunderbird....Thunderbird is a basic email client, Outlook is a fully blown email/work/will do your grocery shopping automaticaly heavyweight.

Same goes for Office 2003/2007. Then again, I speak from a corporate viewpoint.

Office 2007 is brilliant, especially with MOSS 3.0. To answer the OP post, there is no alternative, if you want the essentials, sure OpenOffice etc, but Office 2007/2003 is king of the hill from a corporate perspective anyway. Anyone who says otherwise is deluded.
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nail on head springs to mind.

your thinking from the coporate thing, im looking at it from a humble normal bloke wanting to send a few e-mails & write a few documents etc
 
OpenOffice.

If I didn't get Office free from university, i'd use Openoffice. I did for a fair few years - however they teach in Office so it was better for me to use that.
 
It all depends on what you 'need' to do with the suite. I bet my mortgage that all those singing the praises of Office 2007 (which I have used by the way) never use all of the functionality. Therefore, OpenOffice with Thunderbird or Evolution is more than adequate for 99% of the people on this planet, the other 1% percent need to get out more.

As for Outlook, it is without doubt the most appalling example of software ever written. Just simply horrible. :)
 
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