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 Alternatives to Microsoft Word -- Demosthenes || Post in the forum
 Submitted by Demosthenes
Tired of MS Word?
Me too. It's buggy, bloated, and expensive. I don't use it at all anymore, not even at work. I figured I'd post something helpful for a change, in addition to my usual "bitch of the week" in the Rants section.
There are alternatives for Windows users that are just as easy to use, and best of all, free.
Here are some suggestions worth a look or two:
OpenOffice.org -- Has a great Windows version, does most of the things that most people use Word for, but with less frustration. Plus, you can save things as Word documents for your MS-only friends and cow-orkers. One of the best features is the "save as PDF" feature. I use this all the time. Click, done! A PDF that anyone with Adobe Acrobat Reader can read. Pretty spiffy.
Abiword -- Another open source word processor that's basically a MS Word clone. Runs a lot faster than MS Word or OpenOffice.org's Writer app, and I've encountered a number of occasions where it interpreted MS Word documents more accurately than OpenOffice.org did where formatting was concerned. It can also save as .DOC for your open-source-impaired friends and colleagues. Not to mention, this application is free as well.
602PC Suite -- Not open source, but there is a free version that has apps comparable to Word and Excel. I haven't used this one much, but it does look pretty nice, though it doesn't have quite as many features as OpenOffice or Abiword in my opinion. There's a commercial version available as well that allegedly has more features, and I'd be willing to bet it costs considerably less than MS Office does. One caveat: the "free" version is 30-day trial only now, apparently. It never used to be that way, but you should be aware that the new one is. At the end of the 30 days you don't have to pay them anything, but they do require you to go through their "FREE online registration" at that point. I haven't done that, so I don't know what's involved, but I bet it isn't anything that can't be snowed by filling out the form with TheJudge's name and email address like everything else we fill out around here.
EasyOffice -- Never used this one, but it looks pretty nice, and according to reviews I've read of it it's pretty easy to use and is loaded with features, even if its interface seems a bit cluttered. Probably worth a look though, and like everything else I'm talking about, it's free, so quitcherbitchin.
There. Now you have no excuse. Why pay hundreds of dollars for an entire MS Office suite of which you really only use 10% of the features? Particularly when stuff like this is available for nothin' but a download.
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