It is true that the Microsoft office is probably the best available software suite for Windows for presentation and office work it is not freely available and is a very heavy as well. Fortunately, Office is not the only option available to get the work done. Here are ten FREE alternatives to what Microsoft Office has to offer.
Google Docs – this suite is probably the best answer to the Microsoft office and is of course developed by Google. The suite is a web based application where word processing documents, spreadsheets and presentations can be created. You can share these documents with friends and coworkers quite effectively with the push of a few buttons
Open Office – Open Office is a great solution for those who are looking for a free open source alternative to the Microsoft family. The suite offers a great open source alternative to the Microsoft family of products. The suite has word processing, a database program, a spreadsheet application and a layout program to create most documents. The suite is compatible with Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.
KOffice – this office suite is consisting of 8 different software that can be used for developing Spreadsheet, Presentation, Project planning and image editing software etc. It is fast, functional and open source.
NeoOffice- NeoOffice took the features of OpenOffice and expanded them to be Mac specific. This offers the same programs in OpenOffice and streamlined them specifically for the Mac user. It is faster than OpenOffice, and uses the Mac OSX Leopard grammar checking features.
Go-oo – Office Suite based on OpenOffice.org. It has better Microsoft binary file support, and better Excel macro (VBA) reliance. Other functionalities include SVG import filter, improved EMF rendering, 3D transitions within presentations, rich fields support, etc
Live Documents – Live Documents is a web-enabled Office productivity suite (word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, mail) that can be used as software on your desktop or as services within your browser whether you are online or offline.
Microsoft Office Online – Microsoft Office Online is the full version of Microsoft Office on the web. Now you can both store and edit files online. It Supports Powerpoint, Excel, OneNote and Word.
Think Free Online Office – Free Online Productivity Suite and Real-time Document Collaboration. ThinkFree Office Live consists of ThinkFree Write for word processing, ThinkFree Calc for spreadsheets and ThinkFree Show for presentations.
GnomeOffice – This was a Linux suite in the beginning, catering to those users with a word processor and a spreadsheet program. It has since expanded to the Windows arena, allowing you to take your documents anywhere with the Open Document format. Gnumeric, the spreadsheet program, offers 189 functions that are not available anywhere else.
Free is a great price to pay for a software suite with the capabilities equivalent to that of Microsoft Office but you would not get all the functionalities of the same. However, the best is definitely available for a price to be paid but these open source and free office suites are definitely the one to try out.
