Ask Download Squad: What's the best alternative to Microsoft Office?

For me, a mix of gnumeric and abiword is doing the job for me. That said, i'm not a heavy user of either, not lately at least. In a pinch though, Vim is the best solution

Openoffice all the way...

The only bummer is no spellcheck support for outlook express, but I found a standalone program (freeware) that does the job just fine.

Jesse

For wordprocessing on mac: NeoOffice/J and Appleworks.

Other platforms: OpenOffice.org

OpenOffice is the best alternative. Download the latest 2.0 build at www.openoffice.org!

Personally, I am stuck with Office for integration with international governments. Sad, really. I used the vastly superior WordPerfect for years. OpenOffice is pretty durned good. As mentioned previously, the only killer app in the basic Office confiuguration is Excel. Maybe Outlook though I get along without it quite well.

I think it's interesting how Microshaft throws hug products at us like Windows or Office that do a couple of things very well and a dozen things very poorly. On the other hand, we figure if we have a spreadsheet that works great, we might as well accept a bloated, semi-functional word processor since it's included.

I haven't used WordPerfect for years but the last version I used (about the time Corel acquired it) was years ahead of where Word is in it's current incarnation.

One wonders: if not for the juggernaut of M$, would FoxPro be better than Access? Would Visicalc be the standard instead of Excel? Would Sidekick be the Outlook on your desktop?

They were the innovators. M$ just buys, repackages and insists we work the way they want us to. -sigh-

Open Office 2 beta is a generation ahead of Open Office 1.1 and its variants and provides the first vaible alternative to Microsoft in may way of thinking for the first time, its slick, it does a lot of the same things, and just feels right ,where as 1.1 felt like Office 97. I agree with one of the comments that Outlook is hard to to beat, I made the switch to Thunderbird and I've never looked back, but I do miss some of the extra features. I read that Evolution is to be ported to Windows this year, I've used in on Linux machines before and this will be an Outlook killer once its available

I use Word for writing papers for school because I can't do without EndNote (http://www.endnote.com), and even though it will scan RTF docs for, I love cite while you write even more.

For everything else, I use something else. Presentations? Keynote. Desktop publishing? Pages eMail? Mail. Calendar? iCal. You get the idea.

Does anyone have a good MS Access replacment for OSX? I've tried FileMaker Pro, but I don't love the GUI, and I find it a bit slow etc. Any ideas?

I am surprised that no one has mentioned Mellel yet. It really excels at multilingual documents. Personally, though, I have given up on wordprocessing. I now produce LaTeX documents with BBEdit. I have given up, as well, on the concept of a suite of applications. Given services, applescript, automator, and launchers like Quicksilver, it is easy to get a variety of applications working in concert allowing the end user to cherry pick according to his or her needs.

Count me in as someone who prefers MS Office 2003.

Outlook is the only app I ALWAYS have running and nothing beats it in terms of the integration of email/calendar/tasks with each other AND my PocketPC AND SharePoint. Plus, the GTD (Getting Things Done) toolbar is key.

In addition, I have become a really big fan of OneNote.

Word, Excel, PowerPoint are used as needed, and I also use Project, Visio and InfoPath for my work.

I tried AbiWord a while ago but it was terrible when it came out bullets and outlines (completely screwing up simple indents/un-indents), so I uninstalled that.

OpenOffice is nice but nothing compelling enough to switch.

Viso for Mac? There is a better, more elegant alternative. It's called OmniGraffle Pro, and it's slick. You can exchange files with Visio via xml format. Project, well that's a different story. However, project is an overly complex cumbersome program. In fact, where I work, a major player networking company, Project is available to everyone, but almost everyone resorts to Excel.

That being said, Office is the defacto standard in business and the easiest thing to do is just to use it, and at home I have it on my Mac, because inevitably someone is always sending a word or powerpoint something or other that just doesn't cross over well into other programs. This is really sad, because Office really is a monopoly, more so than Windows.

It's all about WordPerfect (WP). It blows Word out of the water as it has all along.

The only strike against it is the huge market dominance of Word. Despite that, I use WP at work, even though it's an MS Office environment. I get my work done faster in WP, and when I'm done I can save it in DOC format or copy and paste it into a Word file. Either method works fine.

I can only imagine the weeks and days and months of my life I would've wasted if I tried to get half as much work done in Word. I mean, who makes a program where the "home" key doesn't take you to the start of the line you're typing in?

Their non-standard interpretation of common keys is simply baffling.