Apple Reporter

Microsoft announced another delay of Office 2008, stating the popular suite will be available next year, rather than the second half of this year, as stated in a press release at MacWorld in January. The company cited quality issues for postponing the release, and will miss the crucial holiday buying season as a result.

Since there are few other major software packages remaining to make the jump to Apple’s Universal platform, based on Intel chips (Adobe Creative Suite 3 was the last - and well worth the wait), today’s post will focus on the growing number of free alternatives to MS Office that are gaining ground in terms of functionality and compatibility.

NeoOffice - Based on the Sun-supported OpenOffice.org program, NeoOffice is the closest alternative to MS Office available today. And it’s supported by donations. Although the program opens as a “Suite”, rather than Office, which has standalone Word, PowerPoint, Excel, etc. the package has a fairly short learning curve, and offers the highest cross platform compatibility of the major Office alternatives.

ThinkFree Office - ThinkFree office has developed a very functional alternative to the MSOffice, augmenting it with an online version allowing users to create, share and store documents online for free, with up to 1gig of storage. For basic documents, or for users who are hesitant to pony up the several hundred dollars for MS Office, this is a solid alternative. However, certain features of both Word and Excel are not supported by ThinkFree. For example, Track Changes does not translate between Word generated and ThinkFree-edited docs. In addition, I noticed certain formulas generated in Excel do not open in Calc, the ThinkFree spreadsheet program.

Apple iWork - Apple’s Keynote and Pages are excellent alternatives to PowerPoint and Word, in terms of simplicity and features, but they cannot be considered true alternatives to Office. For Mac users giving presentations that will not need to be converted into PowerPoint, Keynote is simply a more elegant way to give a presentation - and the audience will see the difference. Rather than the cluttered, texty orientation of PowerPoint. It will change the way you present. However, when converting to PowerPoint, much of the clean formating and transitions are lost.

In Pages, it’s much the same. Document formatting is much cleaner. The entire interface is more intuitive, even for complex layouts. But documents are saved in .pages formats, and need to be exported to .doc format to be read by Word. Complex formatting almost never transitioned accurately. In addition, Tracked Changes from a Word doc do not translate to Pages, so it is difficult to edit a Word doc in Pages and send it back to a Word user if you want them to see changes. Apple’s next version of iWork, which could be released as early as next week, may solve many of these little compatibility issues that prevent iWork from being used in multi-platform environments.

So why wait for Office ‘08? If system slowdowns and crashes of Office 2004 have you at your wits end, try one of the low-cost alternatives. Although there are quirks in most of them, most provide a reliable, fast alternative to the bloated incumbent productivity suite.

microsoft, microsoft office, microsoft office 2008, pages, keynote, iwork, thinkfree.org, openoffice.org, adobe, creative suite, cs3, leigh fatzinger,