Five Free Alternatives of MS Office


Talk about office productivity tools and invariably most of the people will instantly talk about Microsoft Office. While the penetration that MS Office enjoys is nowhere close to its free and open source counterparts, it makes all the more sense for small and medium businesses to atleast explore alternatives to MS Office to enhance office productivity.

Contrary to the popular belief, you actually don’t compromise on any feature when you make the shift from MS Office to open source office software. The options today are feature-rich and offer access to online documentation and large communities of users and developers. Much to your delight, today they also support common document types.

So rise above the purchase fee and pay per user model, and make the switch to these options:


1. LibreOffice
LibreOffice is the power-packed free, libre and open source personal productivity suite for Windows, Macintosh and GNU/Linux, which offers six feature-rich applications for all your document production and data processing needs: Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw, Math and Base. Not only this, you also get support and documentation free from their large, dedicated community of users, contributors and developers.

Moreover, LibreOffice is seen as more actively developed than OpenOffice, and it offers standard package like PDF import, a presentation minimizer and a Wiki publisher.


2. Apache OpenOffice
 Apache is one of the most commonly known free and open office software. It offers tools for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics and databases. It lets you save documents in the OpenDocument format, which means you can read Microsoft Word documents and also store your work in Microsoft Word format.

Apache includes six basic tools: Writer, the word processor; Calc, the spreadsheet application; Impress, for multimedia presentations; Draw, an image application; Base, the database tool and Math, which can help make complex calculations easy to handle.

3. Google Docs
Google Docs is an office productivity suite for anyone with a Gmail account. Users can create, share and collaborate on the Web. It offers documents, spreadsheets, presentations, drawings and forms, that are all centrally stored and accessed via the cloud-based storage service Google Drive. The Google Docs apps are named Google Documents, Google Spreadsheets, Google Presentations, Google Drawing and Google Forms.

You can access these files from anywhere, as long as you have an Internet connection.


4. NeoOffice
 NeoOffice was developed before OpenOffice and LibreOffice supported Mac OS. It has almost all the features of OpenOffice.org but, in focusing on the unique needs of Mac users, offers a Mac-like installation process and better support for Mac features, including integration into the OS X interface and use of Mac OS X fonts and printing services, PC World reports.

The latest version of the NeoOffice, v3.3, offers support for high-resolution text drawing on Retina displays, is compatible with Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion and Gatekeeper, and native Mac OS X text highlighting. Users can also securely share NeoOffice files with other users, computers and devices.


5. KOffice
KOffice provides three tools of an office suite, i.e. a word processor, a spreadsheet and a presentation application. KWord is the word processing and desktop publishing application. It features styles, word count, page count, easy zooming and print preview. KCells calculation and spreadsheet tool is used to create business-related spreadsheets listing, for example, income and expenditure or employee working hours. KOffice’s Showcase is a presentation application that supports elements such as graphics, text, charts and images.




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