Alternatives to MS-Office AND Open Office

[Paws]

Essentially I just need a word processor and spreadsheet that saves in a format that can easily be loaded/imported in other office suites.

I tried Jarte, it sucks. Papyrus is commercial. I didn't test the free 2006 version of Softmaker yet, but it's... 2006 and the newer version commercial. IBM Lotus Symphony seems bloated and bulky like Open Office.

Wordpad doesn't display images in the document.

What else is there?

 

[SirThomas]

Surely it would just be so much easier, just to get MS Office, lol
New version is pretty awesome...

Tom

 

[trinket]

What else is there?

There's always Corel's WordPerfect. You didn't mention if you were looking for purely free alternatives or were willing to look at commercial software as well, but it's a solid choice. And they've worked hard on the Office import/export capability.

 

[looseliam]

Why don't you care for open office? You said it's because it's "bloated." Are you talking about total program size? If so, keep in mind that it's a full-fledged office suite - not a quick notepad.

 

[Corny]

real men use LaTeX

 

[kevinssogay]

what about iWork?

 

[T-Rexx]

AbiWord for your word processor and Abykus for your spreadsheet.


In the free world of office suites, we have Gnome Office, Calligra Suite, OpenOffice, LibreOffice, and Lotus Symphony. But, the best of those are not available for your platform.

 

[Paws]

I forgot to mention: for Windows and free.

Why don't you care for open office? You said it's because it's "bloated." Are you talking about total program size? If so, keep in mind that it's a full-fledged office suite - not a quick notepad.

It still takes ages to load, it hangs/lags on certain functions and has too many things I don't need.

real men use LaTeX

I could use HTML and CSS for text stuff, but what do I take for spreadsheets?

 

[T-Rexx]

It still takes ages to load, it hangs/lags on certain functions and has too many things I don't need.

That is a Windows problem, not OpenOffice.

I just timed it. It takes 3 seconds to load OO Writer from the (mechanical) hard drive to an open, blank document on Ubuntu 10.10. And it runs very fast.

 

[Michiko]

I am an academic OpenOffice user (at my college we use Ubuntu and OpenOffice) and I bitch at it daily... It lags and crashes on Linux too. My personal choice is Microsoft Office.

As for alternatives, AbiWord is decent for casual word processing, and Gnumeric is lightweight and strong in the fields of statistics and analysis. Both are better under Linux than under Windows, though, especially Gnumeric which looks horribly non-native on Windows.

 

[Corny]

I could use HTML and CSS for text stuff, but what do I take for spreadsheets?

LaTeX tables 8)

 

[Michiko]

LaTeX tables 8)

LaTeX is a coder's dream: that way, you can turn even typical office work into a coding challenge... haha.

 

[thermodynamics]

real men use LaTeX

Amen to that!

Compared to Office, OpenOffice takes a long time to load because it has to load all of the supporting services and libraries. Office can take advantage of some of the services that are already running as a part of Windows.

 

[teadrinker]

It depends what you want it for - for occasional small documents (memoranda, letters etc), or massive things like company reports and user manuals? Linux, Windows, or MacOS? I use OpenOffice under Linux, and have no problem with it, but mainly I used the word processor to open Word documents sent to me. For all my own writing (books, articles, notes, reports etc), I use LaTeX.

There are some quite good online office suites now. Zoho office is well worth a look, and also Google Docs.

-T.

 

[rbenn555]

You can try the ms office web apps??

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/web-apps/

 

[seven2go]

Knoppix has a great "office" programs built in and you can run in from a bootable CD.......

http://www.knoppix.net/about.php

 

[Paws]

Oh shit, I forgot to mention that it needs to be for Windows and not a cloud or live-CD solution

 

[silosybin]

have you tried google documents?

 

[Paws]

I think I found something, at least from the screenshots:

http://www.ssuitesoft.com/qtwriterexpress.htm
http://www.ssuitesoft.com/qtcalcexpress.htm





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;

 

[thanol]

That is a Windows problem, not OpenOffice.

I just timed it. It takes 3 seconds to load OO Writer from the (mechanical) hard drive to an open, blank document on Ubuntu 10.10. And it runs very fast.

He probably just has a slow computer. Word and Excel load in seconds on my computer, but that doesn't mean that Word and Excel load that quickly on all computers.