Fifth Element: All-in-one office suite, no flying taxi cabs

While most Microsoft Office competitors will give you a word processor, spreadsheet application, presentation viewer, and database manager, Ssuite's Fifth Element free office suit goes a few dozen steps further. Fifth Element includes over 30 free applications ranging from a Mac OS X dock-like program launcher to a CD ripper. Oh yeah, and it has tools for creating and editing Office documents. And the whole suite comes in a 30MB downloadable package. Once installed, Fifth Element uses just 48MB of disk space.

If you're looking for a robust office suite, you're not going to find anything here that you won't find in OpenOffice.org. While there are tools to create and modify spreadsheets and text-based documents, Fifth Element does a pretty poor job of importing documents created with newer versions of Microsoft Office. For example, the SpreadForm application will let you open XLS files, but good luck opening anything newer than an Excel 5 spreadsheet.

But if compatibility with Microsoft Office doesn't matter to you, Fifth Element does provides a ton of useful applications, including a system monitor, address book, image editing software, an envelope printing utility, and even a chess game.

[via GoOrange and PC World]

Tags: fifth-element, freeware, office-suite