Office Suites, What Should You Use?

There are a lot of office suites in the professional market today with Microsoft Office being the reigning champion for years. Until recently, the only legal way to get your hands on Microsoft Office was to buy a physical copy for a decent sum of cash yet there are many alternative options these days. If you work for a large enough company, you might have a chance to get the latest office version for $9.95 from the Microsoft Home Use Program. I myself was able to get a copy using a hotmail account and a code the Microsoft Marketing Director published online two years ago but they have send quashed all those codes (I tried looking for a new one, didn't see any that worked).

As far as free, even the online versions of Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft PowerPoint are available with a Microsoft Account on Office.Live.com. Even Google has their own office presence online with Google Docs for creating documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and even forms, which can even open and edit Microsoft Office documents, and all you need is a Google Account.  While Google Docs can't save the file as anything but Google's own format, you can download the files as Microsoft Office document extensions and no one would ever know the difference.

But free online Office suites aside, there is a program that is tough to beat, totally free and has the ability to do all of that when you don't have an internet connection, OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice.org.

Originally made free by Sun Microsystems, OpenOffice was always a community project that formed from the purchase of StarOffice and turned open-source. When Sun was purchased by Oracle, they first tried to rebrand OpenOffice as Oracle Open Office and decided it wasn't making them money so discontinued it. After many contributors left to form LibreOffice, which has it'e roots in the original OpenOffice, Oracle gave OpenOffice to the Apache Software Foundation which has made moderate improvements to the software suite. Lately, LibreOffice has been updated more often and working on new features at a faster rate although both suites give you the same basic functionality and most users won't re able to tell much of a difference other than cosmetics.

The best thing about both suites is that both are made for Windows, OSX, and Linux. Granted, the online office suites listed above also work on any operating system that can run the web browser requirements needed. Most distributions of Linux like Ubuntu come with one of the two pre-installed.

LibreOffice Toolbar

OpenOffice Toolbar

Another good thing about both, besides them running on more operating systems than most suites, is the toolbar.  Since Microsoft Office 2010, Microsoft has been re-inventing their toolbar.  More people complain about the ribbon than people who actually like it and, while I know there are people who love it, the average user who doesn't use Office that often and dislike the change for basic things.

OpenOffice and LibreOffice have a toolbar that is familiar, simple, and capable of doing everything the average user will need from an office suite, students included. LibreOffice has one that uses slightly larger icons, which I'm sure the more mature crowd will enjoy while OpenOffice has a much smaller file size. With all features installed, LibreOffice on Windows is just over 900MB and OpenOffice is just over 300MB, almost a third the size.  Granted, with today's computers, file size usually isn't an issue and LibreOffice does have more features than OpenOffice and release new versions at a much higher rate.