I received a great question today from one of my regular readers and writers, so thanks Ivan for turning me around. I was going to have an entirely different theme today but it will have to wait.
Ivan asked, "What choices do I have beside Microsoft Office to install on my computer?"
I thought that I would send him to one of my previous articles and then I realized I had mentioned this before but never specifically addressed it. So, the answer is, "Yes, there are two freebies which are excellent replacements for MS Office. I have tested both and I do have a preference.
First, off let me state that Microsoft Office is the "King of the World" when it comes to office suites being used by people all over the world. However, I will also state that OpenOffice and LibreOffice are excellent and mimic most of the functionality of the "King." Please, note that they both merge the two names. That is not my typo.
There are people who swear by both of them and both are excellent. However, my personal opinion is that LibreOffice is slightly better. The main reason is the same people were originally working on this application and it was only known as "OpenOffice." Apparently there was a developer/designer conflict. Some of the folks wanted to move in a slightly new direction and others wanted to remain on course. A "spilt" resulted with the new group forming LibreOffice.
I believe LibreOffice is slightly better mainly because they provide updates to the entire office suite as well as individual features a little more often than OpenOffice.
Let me share more good news. Either OO or LO have suite members which do most of the same things found in MSO. You can create and edit text documents, spreadsheets, presentations, databases and more. Another very nice feature is the ability to open and save in the Microsoft formats. That way if you use one of these two to create a file (or edit one you received from a MS Office user) it can be saved in the MSO format. You can even set the default document types the same as MS types.
If you want to take them for a spin, do as I did and install both. Try them out and decide for yourself if one is better than the other.
Be warned that when you download either they are very large files. This means that it could take quite a while to download them depending on your internet speed. There are also many online tutorials for them so you will not be at a loss as to how to do tasks with either.
