A free alternative to MS Office

Owning a new PC or Macintosh is only half the story.

You also need software - and lots of it! If you were to buy Microsoft Word (£199), Quark Xpress, (£899) Adobe Photoshop (£549) and Macromedia's Dreamweaver (£399) together you could easily spend more than the cost of the hardware.

But there are alternatives to commercial software packages and some are even free.

Such as NeoOffice (http://www.planamesa.com), which is described as a fully-featured set of office applications, including word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, and drawing programs, for Mac OS X. NeoOffice is the Mac version of OpenOffice, a PC program I reviewed a few years ago. Available as a 124Mb download, you had better allow half an hour or so to install it, even with broadband.

NeoOffice takes a good 30 seconds to boot up, but is impressive from the start with the menu structure very similar to Word.

Spell checking is done in real time and it has a UK English dictionary so it knows the difference between color and colour. I couldn't find a word count tool, but the help option soon showed me that File>>Properties>>Statistics was the place to go, although you can only word count a whole document and not sections. The program also has a think ahead feature that tries to guess what you are trying to type. Just like predictive text on mobile phones, I couldn't get used to it and switched it off.

If you are beginning to think that I liked NeoOffice you are right. In the two hours or so that I played with it I was impressed. It feels like a viable alternative to MS Office and it even opened up both Excel and Powerpoint files created on a PC, the latter only needing a little tweak to the fonts to make sure they fitted the screen perfectly. It will also save files in MS Word .doc format, so clients need never know you are a cheapskate.

posted by Steve Nichols @ 4:16 PM Comments: 4