Office and its rivals
- Article 1 of 1
- Desktop Evolution, October 2002
Microsoft's Office suite dominates desktop computing. There are alternatives, but how do they measure up in terms of features and functionality?
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Microsoft Office, with some 94% of the office software suite market by revenue, is the de facto standard of office application suites. Many, if not most, PCs ship with a bundled copy of the software; training courses in desktop applications are almost always MS Office-related; and any start-up looking to equip its workers with word processors, spreadsheets, personal information managers and presentation software invariably picks Redmond's finest.
Indeed, such is Microsoft's domination of the market that no office worker's CV is complete without skills in MS Word and Excel, while managers are usually expected to complement this with either MS PowerPoint or Project.
But simply because something is the standard does not mean it is the best or the best suited for a particular task. And it is certainly unlikely to be the cheapest. There are many other packages available with similar capabilities to MS Office. For the buyer, the question is: What are the implications - financial and otherwise - of diverging from the standard.
Here are the available products.
WordPerfect Office 2002
For most of the 80s and early 90s, Corel's WordPerfect suite was the equal, if not the superior, to MS Office. It was not until the mid-90s that MS Office overtook WordPerfect. Now, the former leader is left to carve a niche in Microsoft's world. “Word is the technology we swim in,” rues Graeme Brown, VP of software development at Corel.
Initially, a user of Word looking at WordPerfect would not see much different since the interface follows Microsoft's usability guidelines. “We fully follow standards and are XP compatible,” claims Brown. And the software readily imports and exports Office documents, he says. “We try to preserve as much as possible as native Word documents.”
The main difference, though, is in the system's handling of long documents. Brown argues that WordPerfect's functions and approach mean it can handle long documents more easily than Word. “The two programs are based on entirely different premises. Word is based around styles. Paragraphs get styles attached to them. With WordPerfect, you can go to the beginning of a document, change the font, and it will change throughout the whole document.”
Other features that help with long documents include Reveal Codes, which expose the formatting tags that produce bold, italic and other changes. “You get to see in a textual frame all the information about the formatting of a document. When something goes wrong because you accidentally deleted some formatting, it's easy to delete the code that is messing things up”.
Other parts of the suite have similar differentiators. The Corel Presentations module, the equivalent of Microsoft's PowerPoint, can export presentations as Macromedia Flash files for display on the web or as PDFs, and its 'Show on the Go' facility saves the presentation as a program that any Windows computer can run, even if they do not have Presentations. It also has other niche tools such as speech recognition via Dragon NaturallySpeaking and the Pocket Oxford dictionary.
StarOffice/OpenOffice
The cheapest option for many users is OpenOffice, a version of Sun's StarOffice maintained by the open source community. OpenOffice and StarOffice differ little, since they share most of the same code. However, StarOffice comes with various tools that Sun has licensed from third parties such as dictionaries and thesauruses; a collaborative environment similar to Microsoft's Outlook; and support from Sun.
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