Surviving Without MS Office

A few months ago I got a new laptop. It had nothing but Windows 7 installed on it. The first thing you always have to do with a new computer is to install all the software that you need to be productive. An office suite is one of the key pieces of software that just about any business person needs. The ability to create word documents, presentations, access email, and build spreadsheets is paramount to surviving in corporate America. So I went on over to the Microsoft website and see that Office 2010 costs $279! That’s quite a bit of cabbage for being productive! I wanted to see what the chances were that I could continue to do business without relying on Microsoft and without having to pay a dime.

My first stop was to check out Google Docs. For those of you that have not experienced Google Docs you can check it out at http://docs.google.com/. It’s completely free, but you need to sign up for a Google account in order to use it. There are some great benefits with Google Docs. You don’t need to install any software, it runs completely in your browser. It’s compatible with Microsoft Office documents which allows you to open, modify, and export in Microsoft Office formats which allows other users that you send and receive files with to use whatever software they wish without incompatibility issues. Google Docs has added some great stuff too like the ability to collaborate with other users on the same document at the same time. They even have a simple web form publishing tool that allows you to collect data from people through a simple web form. It’s not without its downfalls though. In May of 2010 they removed their offline support which means that you can only access your Google Docs if you are connected to the Internet. They keep saying they are coming out with something bigger and better than what they had before, but it has yet to be announced. It’s also a little bit of a pain to have open files because first you have to upload a file to Google Docs before you can open and read it.

My next stop was Open Office. This is a project done by the company Oracle and you can find it at http://www.openoffice.org/. Open Office is a traditional software package that you install on your computer, but it is also absolutely free. It is also fully compatible with all Microsoft Office formats, so you don’t need to worry about proprietary formats that other people have to have the same software installed in order to be able to open your files. Of course this is with the caveat that you have to manually tell it to save files in a Microsoft format every time you save a file. This can tend to be pretty cumbersome and it’s pretty difficult to get it to save it as a Microsoft document by default. However you don’t have to worry about being connected to the Internet to have access to your documents.

In conclusion, it is possible to survive without Microsoft Office. I’ve been using a combination of both Google Docs and Open Office for nearly 6 months. It’s totally been worth not sending Microsoft a check for $279. I encourage you to give it a try and use that $279 toward something that you’ll get a better return on.