The price tag of Microsoft Office 2007 was a big shocker – the Ultimate suite costs a whopping $675! Even the Basic suite is $150, and it includes just Word, Excel and Powerpoint. This has led many people to go looking for lesser priced or free alternatives. And thankfully, there ARE a lot of such alternatives available! In this post, I will be covering the free offline alternatives to MS-Office, for both Windows and Mac. A later post will cover the free online apps.

Please note that unless specified, these office suites don’t support the native formats of Office 2007 (they support formats till Office 2003). However, later versions should include this support as well.


OpenOffice.org (Sun Microsystems)

Unless you have been stranded on an island for the past three years, you have probably heard of something called OpenOffice. This complete and open source office suite has today surfaced as the biggest competitor to MS-Office. OOo is cross platform and includes a word processor (Writer), spreadsheet (Calc), presentation tool (Impress), database manager (Base), all purpose calculator (Math) and a professional drawing tool (Draw). All these tools support the respective Office formats and the more flexible Open Document Format as well. With OOo, you won’t get purring cats or hat wearing wizards to assist you in your work, but you can still get most of the work done easily due to the simple OfficeXP-like interface. One cool feature in OOo is the ability to directly export the created documents in PDF and HTML formats. The strength of OOo lies in it’s open source base, which results in frequent version upgrades, bug fixes and availability of a large number of extensions.

Home | Download.com | Extensions

Google Pack – StarOffice (Google – Sun Microsystems) [Windows Only]

StarOffice is yet another office suite from Sun Microsystems. It’s based on OOo and actually costs $70, but is now included for free with Google Pack! The Google Pack version of StarOffice adds an extra Google search box to the apps. This special version is available only to Windows users as of now. StarOffice is pretty much similar to OOo with a few additional features:
-Better spell-check facility
-Greater variety of pre-made templates
-Better interoperability with other major office suites (notably WordPerfect)
-ADABAS support
-Professional tech support from Sun (you won’t avail this with the Google Pack edition)
-Separate extensions

Home | Google Pack | Extensions

Lotus Symphony (IBM) [Windows Only]

Symphony, still in beta, is one of the latest offline suites to hit the market. It is comparable to Office 2007 Basic, and includes a word processor, presentation tool and a spreadsheet. The sleek Office-like interface of Symphony makes it a must have for all whose work is confined to these three tools. Like OOo and StarOffice, it supports the native Office and Open Document formats.

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OxygenOffice Professional (SourceForge project by Kami) [Windows Only]

Both OOo and StarOffice horribly lack in availability of inbuilt templates, cliparts and photo galleries. There are lots of these stuff available for download, but who wants to take the pain? OOoP addresses this by including a 3400-strong clipart and photo gallery. There are extra fonts, templates, sample documents and a Wikipedia search box included as well. Other tweaks like enhanced help menus and user manuals make OOoP a cool improvement over OOo. However if you already have OOo, you can simply download the gallery extensions from here.

Home | Download.com

NeoOffice (Planamesa Inc.) [Mac Only]

NeoOffice is the OOo hybrid for Mac OSX. OOo itself has a Mac version, but you should consider NeoOffice for a better Mac-ish look and a “dozen native Mac features“. Among these features is the ability to read “most” Office 2007 formats, which is really cool. I am not a Mac user so you will have to explore NeoOffice yourself.

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AbiWord (AbiSource Community)

AbiWord is a standalone word processor with features very similar to Microsoft Word. It is open source, cross platform and supports the .odt and .doc formats, besides having it’s own proprietary format. If you use only Word of your Office suite (many people do), AbiWord will be a good and light substitute. A Vista compatible version has not been released yet.

Home | Download.com

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