Six office alternatives

For a lot of folks, it makes more sense to just keep using the Office you've already got. You have it, you know it, you know your documents work with it. For my purposes, there hasn't been a significant enhancement to Office since Office 97.

One bone with the list:

Google Docs? Is that guy serious? Has he ever tried to do real work with Google Docs? I would bet not.

Gee, Dino, do you ever know how to write a misleading headline.

bigg,

Forgive him, because it is so near to New Year's Day that he still hungers for that stuff.

dino,

When are you scheduled for your next AA meeting? As a friend, please do not miss the next several meetings. You need to get back on the wagon, quick.

YBT

Well, there is one point I can agree with there Dino, of the several that can easily be inferred. If you are going to compare lemons to lemons the first thing you have to eliminate are 'cloud' apps. Cloud apps are only slightly more abhorrent than proprietary applications.

Questions to ask, will the format be forward compatible? Will the service itself and thereby the data entrusted to it be available next month, next year, after the next patent troll finds something to play with?

OK, you guys --

Try telling me that Microsoft Office isn't software porn. You can do a few things if you get your hands on it, but it's more impressive to look at than to touch, and, really, no matter how many ways they try to jazz it up, it's still the same old story.

dino,

Sorry ... porn? I had not even thought of that option, I was thinking more along the line of a barrel labeled XXX, meaning booze, but porn ... maybe I should check MS Office out. As a good shill / astroturfer for MS that should be seen as my responsibility, no my duty.

Be back in a while, depends how well it is hidden and how interesting the shots are.

YBT

What a career path, investigating booze and porn. A growth industry if I ever saw one.

The key for me is when starting a new project that needs some kind of office-suite-ish component or Web-based collaboration to base it on either OpenOffice or something like Google Docs.

I'm going to be doing just such a thing, and just to make things easy on me, I'll probably be using Google Docs. In this case formatting isn't something that is very important to the project's success, and making things look like snazzy Word/OO Writer documents is wholly unimportant. The freeness, universality and relative security of Google Docs is key ...

Looking back at the article referenced in this thread, I think the guy did a good job covering the main "alternatives" to MS Office.

@tc:

Bad pun! No cookie!

I'm so very sorry, gus3.*

*not really sorry