5 Microsoft Office Alternatives

Want to try new productivity suites instead of Microsoft Office which is holding on your desktop? There are lot of choices. Corel, Sun Microsystems, Apple, IBM and many others offer alternatives to Microsoft Office.

These options offer most of the features found in Microsoft Office, plus are also available for free or at a very nominal cost.

Here are the 5 Microsoft Office alternatives.

Google Docs

Developed by Internet search giant Google, Web-based Google Docs offers word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, and form application. Documents can be shared, opened, and edited by multiple users at the same time. Google Docs also allows users to create and edit documents online while collaborating real-time with other users.

Google Docs can also be accessed offline with Gears. When a user is not connected to the Internet, Google Docs uses information stored on his computer's hard drive, rather than relying on information sent across the network.

Corel WordPerfect

WordPerfect is a word processing application developed by Corel. The office software helps create documents, spreadsheets and presentations, manages email and has its own built-in PDF tools.

It lets users create letters, reports, newsletters, budgets, invoices, receipts, slide shows, proposals and interactive reports. It can also turn complex spreadsheets into charts and graphs.

OpenOffice

Another Microsoft Office competitor, OpenOffice is a free open-source office application suite offering support for standard OpenDocument Format (ODF) for data interchange as well as Microsoft Office formats. The suite offers word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics and databases.

Adobe Buzzword

Here's a free online word processor from Adobe called Buzzword. It lets users write reports, proposals and share it with others.

Buzzword has two views, Document Organiser and Editor. The Editor choose fonts, text styles and format paragraphs. It also lets users add lists, images, tables, and comments to a document.The Document Organiser shows all Buzzword documents, the one's that are shared and created by the user.

Jarte

Another alternative to Microsoft Word is Jarte, a light-weight, portable word processor based on the WordPad engine.Its basically a freeware and can be downloaded from its website freely.Jarte uses the Windows built-in word processing engine at its core.

Features include the ability to edit Microsoft Word documents, OLE support, spell checker, page breaks and single-click bookmarking.