I think it's safe to say we all have a love-hate relationship with Microsoft and one fact is almost assured: like it or not Microsoft Office is something we all have to deal with. The question is though--do I have to use Microsoft Office? No ... and yes. Let's step into the world of office suites.
For this post we're not talking about the place in a building where you have desks, chairs, and filing cabinets, we're talking word processors, spreadsheets, and presentation tools. The leading office suite is Microsoft's Office. MS Office, as we call it in polite company, is a set of applications designed to work together to do the common business and personal tasks we're all familiar with. Want to get your resume in order, fire up Word. Need to crank out a budget, Excel. Have to present your great idea to the Board, PowerPoint. These applications have become so common and synonymous with their tasks that saying "do you have your PowerPoint ready" really means "do you have your electronic presentation and slides ready". So if MS Office is every where, why is there any question, why don't we just all use it? Well first off, contrary to popular belief, MS Office isn't free. Yes, I know, shocking. MS Office doesn't come with Windows, sometimes you get its little brother MS Works when you buy a computer, but that's an add-on and still not included with Windows.
Okay, so it costs, no big deal right? Right, but here's the other thing, a lot of us loathe MS Office almost as much as Windows, and if you're using Linux, there isn't even a version of MS Office for you. Only Macs and PCs have MS Office versions available. The love-hate relationship with Office comes from the times with it misbehaves or you have to jump through some serious hoops to get something done. Then there is the fact that since everyone uses MS Office, well you have to as well.
Or do you?
There are several decent alternatives to MS Office, but here's the catch, they are all measured against not in how well they work, but how well they work with, you guessed it, MS Office. I'm going to go a few of my favourites here and give you my take on how well they stack up against each other and MS Office.
First out of the gate is the venerable OpenOffice. OpenOffice is a project sponsored by Sun Microsystems to create a free, open source, cross platform alternative to MS Office. OO runs on Macs, PCs, and Linux. There was a commercial version of it called Star Office, which I even bought a copy of back in the day, which has fallen by the wayside. OO has everything you need in an office suite, which the exception of an included email-contact-calendar applications (e.g. an alternative to MS Outlook). The word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation apps all look and work like you'd expect. They can open and save MS Office document formats.
So if OO is free, why hasn't it taken off like wildfire? Well beyond the Linux community where it is the only (real) choice, OO doesn't have the greatest track record for compatibility with MS Office. Sure, a simple document or spreadsheet might be fine, but much beyond that things can get go sideways fast. Before I start getting the pro-Open Office hate mail, I know that it is leaps and bounds better than it was. OpenOffice should be given real props for creating a real alternative to MS Office, still when you have to play nice with the giant in the sandbox, every little bit against you adds up fast.
Which brings me to the other tech behemoth: Google and Google Docs. When Google bought the online word processor Writely a few years ago, we knew that something big was going to be coming. A little while later Google Docs rolled out (Writely had already earned its place in the hearts and minds of the tech set), we knew that we had a worthy online word processor that also let us share the documents, then also open them in Word. Since Google Docs launched we now have spreadsheets and presentations in the mix. All of these are fantastic pieces of work. Useable, sharable, easy. Online.
And really only online. Yes, with Google Gears you can have offline documents, but not really in the way you'd hope. like having a complete word processor in a browser whenever you wanted.
Again, the ugly head of compatibility with MS Office rises up from the gloom. Like OpenOffice, Google Docs and Spreadsheets is good, but not perfect. Because Google Docs converts Word documents into HTML, it isn't hard for things to get wonky. Working with images and charts in Google Docs is better left to either the eternally patient or already insane.
I use Google Docs a lot, even with those flaws, because I can share a document because Macs, PCs, and even Ubuntu and know that it will be the same for each of them. I know that the document can be exported to a local drive in a myriad ways. I also know that it can't completely replace an office suite like MS Office or OpenOffice. The limitations of working within a web browser are just too great to allow for the word processing, etc functions we're used to having at our fingertips.
For us in the Mac set you might be tempted with iWork. I was when I got my Mac. I downloaded the trial and started using it with glee.
Sorta.
I wasn't enamoured with Pages (word processing) or Keynote (presentations). Numbers was fine (I don't do a lot of spreadsheet work), but not stellar. What was the reall kicker was iWork really, really wants you to stick to its file formats. Uh huh, great, except for the fact that many of us are constantly exchanging files with people using MS Office. In iWork you need to export the files for every change, then re-open the new doc and save as pages, etc. There isn't a "always open and save as Word" opition. Even MS Word 2007 or 2008 allows you to set the default format to be Office 2003 .doc instead of .docx.
That was it for me. I knew that eventhough I tried. Eventhough there are great features in iWork, OpenOffice, and Google Docs, none of them are 100% compatible with MS Office. The time spent fixing a presentation or document just because one memeber of the team want to buck the trend and be different adds up fast. Believe me it didn't take long for the people I was working with to demand I stop using Star Office and get myself back on MS Office when every time I edited and saved a presentation it took someone an hour to fix all the formatting that was wrecked.
Which is why I bit the bullet and bought MS Office for Mac 2008 before my 30 day trial of iWork was even half over.
So in the end, no you don't have to use or buy MS Office, there are great alternatives, however if you exchange a lot of documents with other people using MS Office, you might find yourself fixing a lot of documents.
Message Edited by MikeLee on 07-28-2009 07:44 PM
Message Edited by Laura on 08-21-2009 05:01 PM
