Issue 14.16
Microsoft has released Office 2016 in a few different configurations (Home and Student lists at $150 and Professional lists at a little under $400). You can also rent Office 365 by the month for about $10. I say rent because, even though they call it a subscription service, if you stop paying them, you no longer can use the programs. To put this in perspective, say you used 365 for 3 years (which would cost you about $360) then didn’t pay them their monthly fee – you would find that you could no longer use any of the programs. You do have the advantage of getting their newest versions whenever they are released, but it seems to me to be a high price to pay.
Alternatives to Microsoft’s Office Suite have been around for a long time. Word Perfect is still out there and offering their product at prices comparable to Microsoft. In some ways I like Word Perfect better, but the compatibility issue is still a concern though it is not that much of a problem anymore.
The other alternatives that many people are beginning to use are the free and open source office suites available to download. The free programs used to be hard to use and not compatibility friendly, but that has changed significantly in the last couple of years. Functionality has also improved markedly during that time.
I have used both Open Office and Libre Office for the last few years. The improvements both have made are impressive. The most recent versions are 4.12 for Open Office and 5.1.1 for Libre Office. Because they are open-source, you can modify the look and features of both if you are an experienced programmer, but for most of us, we just want something that works. I have found the word processors, spreadsheet and presentation parts of these office suites to be as able with most tasks as my Word, Excel and Powerpoint programs are and in fact use them instead of the MS products at times. If you already have Microsoft products that work, I wouldn’t get rid of them right now. But as MS moves more towards the rental/subscription idea, you may want to be comfortable with something that doesn’t cost you more money every month you use it.
You can download them at libreoffice.org and openoffice.org respectively. I would not download through a third party because they can have malware or viruses attached. There are a few others you may want to check out such as Softmaker, Zoho and Google Docs. The last two are cloud based so you have to have a good internet connection to use them.
As I have used these, I have come to use Libre Office more for word processing and spreadsheets and Open Office for database and presentations, but you can try both to see what you like. There is a small learning curve if you haven’t used them before, but it is easy to translate your documents into MS formats or PDF if you need to send them to other users. Take the time to learn the program you decide on and you will do well – and make sure you always have a backup of anything important.
Shaun McCausland has worked in the computer industry for over 33 years, 26 years of it locally with Bits ‘N’ Bytes and Musicomp and currently works as a computer consultant. If you have questions you can reach him at 435-668-7118 or shaun@musicomp.net.