4 free alternatives to Microsoft Office

Office software often falls foul of the 80/20 rule – the idea that you're likely to use only 20 per cent of the features in an application 80 per cent of the time.

For all the hundreds of features in a package like Microsoft Office, you'll probably rely on only a small subset of them.

The others are reduced to being either features that are 'nice to have' or functionality that is effectively useless.

But this is good news for the competition. You don't need to replicate all of Office's features to offer a viable alternative; simply offer a package that does enough.

What's depressing is that they're all much of a muchness as far as operation goes. You can easily jump between something like OpenOffice.org and AbiWord without noticing much of a difference. And when you do, it's usually going to be an unflattering one.

Take Google Docs. On the one hand, you've got an online word processor complete with offline functionality. On the other, it's far behind the times when it comes to actual day-to-day tasks. Its spreadsheet module lacks basic features like letting you start graph axes at relevant data instead of at zero.

Its word processor is more like filling out a glorified text box, lacking the comfortable margins and style controls of even basic word processing applications. Does this matter? Not to Google, but it does leave the Docs module feeling more like an online scribble pad than an industrial tool. It definitely doesn't have Microsoft quaking in its money bin. Not yet, anyway.

Just too good

Part of the problem is that Microsoft Office is excellent. It's overpriced, no question – it borders on the ridiculous that a standard copy of OneNote costs £70 – but it's nevertheless one of the few packages out there that's not simply the most popular but also unquestionably the best.

Outlook is the only real choice for industrial-level email on the PC, with the '.doc' format the accepted standard everywhere you go. It's not simply the file format that's supported by just about everything under the sun; many things to do with Office – such as the macros and the page layouts – are also standard. An office application that doesn't support it isn't even worth looking at.

But it's notable that Office 2007's new and improved '.docx' format has yet to take off. This is proof enough that Microsoft is feeling the pinch as much as its competitors are. Exactly how do you make something as complete as the Office suite more desirable? And more importantly, how do you make it more desirable when individuals have to shell out nearly £100 just for the Home and Student edition?

This is where Google has an advantage, along with Zoho Office, Thinkfree and other large company side projects like the extremely pretty Adobe Buzzword. If the content is fixed, the context doesn't have to be.

A web-based office offers many advantages. For the company, it's the usual drill: the ability to sell the software as a service, putting adverts on the page and so on. For users, things are more complex.

The obvious benefit is access to files and tools from any net-connected PC. But as systems get more complicated, the files themselves open up. Instead of having to pay for and administer a server, having centralised access to files allows for instant collaboration online.

This could be as simple as allowing multiple users to work on the same document simultaneously or as specific as running a live presentation over the net.

Repository storage

The more niche the requirement, the more potential there is for a company to spring up and provide it. Current bandwidth and server costs make this a relatively cheap proposition, especially if they avoid the slap-on-some-ads business model in favour of charging up front.

Something that would offer a massive boost in this department is if the bigger companies that offer tools like Google Docs were to open up their storage systems as a repository for files and provide a basic selection of tools to play with while letting external sites hook into them, providing more specialised tools.

If this sounds like pie-in-the-sky thinking, it's not: it's more or less what Flickr does now. You save your photos on its service and use them as a gallery, and there's a built-in editing option powered by the third-party Picnik site. The API also lets any external app or website hook into what you've got and process it in new and interesting ways, whether it's feeding your photos into a different editor or ordering prints on Photobox.