Life Without Office

Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and PowerPoint presentations dominate the business world; they've become de facto standards. It seems you can't escape Office even if you're unhappy with its price, its product activation scheme, or Microsoft in general. Fear not, there are numerous less expensive alternatives. While not quite as feature-rich as Office 2003, they handle all common tasks, including reading and writing Office files.

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Two major contenders are Sun Microsystems' StarOffice 7.0 Office Suite ($75.95 direct download, www.sun.com/staroffice; ) and Corel's WordPerfect Office 11 (Standard, $299.99; Professional, $342, www.corel.com; ). Both are powerful equivalents of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. WordPerfect Professional adds Paradox, a database program.

Microsoft Office users will find switching to StarOffice relatively painless, though they'll need to learn new names for some features. Switching to WordPerfect Office will take more adjustment, as the applications in this suite have had years to evolve their own user interface styles. But unique features like WordPerfect's Reveal Codes and real-time formatting preview can make the switch worth the effort.

StarOffice shares a source code base with the free OpenOffice (www.openoffice.org), which frequently offers newer versions of the applications. Sun tests the applications thoroughly before release, provides support, and also adds useful non-open-source utilities. Businesses will prefer this stability to living on the bleeding edge. And mixed-platform companies will appreciate StarOffice's support for Windows, Linux, and Solaris.

Both programs warn of possible data loss when saving in a Microsoft format—a problem we observed first-hand. After several rounds of editing this article in Word, WordPerfect, and StarOffice, we found that StarOffice's spell-checker marked every word as misspelled, and Word would not open it at all. We recommend saving files in your application's native format and exporting to the corresponding Office format only when needed.

Other alternatives include Gobe Corp.'s gobeProductive 3.0 ($99.95, www.gobe.com), an all-in-one application that provides the functions of a suite, and E-press's EasyOffice (free for personal use, www.e-press.com), which includes 19 distinct applications. For more on these and other choices, see "The Office Alternatives" (March 18, 2002).