A Comparison Chart of MS Office Alternatives

Cnet.com reviews the “indie office suites” and provides a handy feature-by-feature comparison chart. I’ve been using NeoOffice, Google docs, and Zoho. While they are not a perfect mesh with MSOffice when you need to share something with someone who only uses Office and doesn’t really know how to deal with minor formatting issues, they allow you to export .pdfs.

I think the always connected issue and the cost, plus the fact that the indies are many times standards-based, makes these the “go to” apps.

The indie suites also provide unique benefits. For example, Corel WordPerfect is the tool of choice for writers and lawyers who need more control over long documents. ThinkFree 3 may be handy for business travelers who want to tweak a document using only a Java-enabled Web browser. Zoho is the only browser-based service that directly plugs into Microsoft Office apps to store work both on the user’s hard drive and on Zoho’s servers. Among the desktop programs, however, only iWork, Microsoft Office, ThinkFree, and OpenOffice work with Macs. Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac is expected to be released next year.
So which to choose? To help get you started, check out this chart.

Source: reviews.cnet.com

Tags: | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |