Free Microsoft Office Suites Alternatives

Office Suite's - Free Microsoft Alternatives

Do you ever feel that you are tied to Microsoft Office when you need to write a letter or use a spread sheet. Well look no further!

If you ever need to save money on an office suite, but you don't really want to or cant really afford to spend your hard earned cash on a vital piece of computer software.

There are some very good open source alternatives to MS Office. The two that I will tell you about is OpenOffice and LibreOffice. These are all commercially free to use, and the best part of all that are Microsoft compatible. So if you were thinking "but my documents are in word format!",  then not to worry, because both applications have the ability open and edit the files. Please be aware that on some occasions you may need to tweak the layout of images, but this doesn't happen all the time.

For all you Apple Mac and Linux users, dont worry you can use this software too.

Open Office

Open Office was the first free office suite that I have ever used. My first impressions of this software was very good. I was so amazed on how easy it was to merge from MS Office. The look and feel seems very similar and most of the functions that you would expect to find are generally in the same place, but there maybe a few functions that are not located in the same place as you would expect.

The equivalents are as follows:

This is a very good solution, if you are looking for a good free office suite application, then this is perfect for any home and business user.

Libre Office

Libre Office is another good office package. This was originally derived from its parent suite Open Office, but its development has exceeded its predecessor. This in my opinion make it a better choice out of the two.

The equivalents are as follows:

As you can see that the applications are named the same as Open Office, this is because it was originally forked from it. Libre Office also contains a module for graphs, which is perfect for incorporating graphs in to your documents giving them the look of a professional written document. As development continues, its similarity to Open Office becomes less and less.

Conclusion

If I were to make a recommendation between the two, my choice would be Libre Office. My choice is based on the fact that it is a further developed product. I personally use Libre Office myself and I found it to be an essential piece of software that I insist is installed on my computers.

Open Office is still a very good piece of kit, and for the basic usage you wont really find any difference between the two products. So this would still make a good solution to use.

There is plenty of documentation available for both of these office suites, and because its open source, there is a lot of help forums, and community of developers available on the internet that will offer assistance when required.