MS Office Alternatives

This week, several of us on the staff were e-mailing about MS Office alternatives. It all started when a friend of mine bought an Intel iMac and wondered what her options are for reading, creating, and writing documents in MS Word, PowerPoint, and Excel format.

We haven’t done any testing, and so this isn’t a product review. It’s just an off-hand collection of pointers to alternatives that we talked about and a way of organizing knowledge about what we discussed internally.

ThinkFree Office. $50.00. I’ve used this product, but in the distant past. It’s a full suite and will open and save documents in MS Word, Excel, and PowerPoint format. My past experience in 2002 was that there were little gotchas in terms of preserving complex formats. I’m sure it’s much better now. The application is written in Java, so it should run on Intel Macs as well, but I’m not absolutely sure. A review is here.

OpenOffice. Free. This is the evolution of the original Star Office from Sun Microsystems. It is Open Source. It will open, create and save documents in MS Word, Excel, and PowerPoint format and also includes a drawing application. It is an X-Windows application written in C++. You need to run it within Apple’s X11 app, but this is not very hard to do. It runs on Power or Intel Macs. A review is here.

NeoOffice. Free. This is a quasi-Macintosh native version of OpenOffice that presents itself through the Mac OS X Aqua interface and is based on the Open Office code base. There are rumors that eventually, it will become a native Cocoa application next year. It will open, create and save documents in MS Word, Excel, and PowerPoint format and has the same drawing application. It runs on Power or Intel Macs. A review is here.

iWork 06 from Apple. $79.95. Apple has created a couple of very nice applications here. Keynote is the Analog to MS PowerPoint and is a lot easier to use. Pages is the Analog to MS Word, but is not a traditional word processor in the sense of MS Word or Nisus Writer. Apple has made some changes that bring it closer to that kind of tool and will probably do more along those lines. Keynote will open, create and export as PowerPoint format. Pages will open, create and export as MS Word documents. Unfortunately, there is no analogue to MS Excel. Rumors have floated about mentioning a spreadsheet analogue variously named Lasso or Numbers to be in iWork 07. No one knows. iWork 06 is a Universal binary. An overview is here.

This is not an exhaustive list. There are other notable single app solutions like AbiWord and Mariner Calc. But this short synopsis should get you started if you’re wondering, as we did, what the current alternatives are.