How to affordably own your office software
Summary: Dump Microsoft Office, with its new licensing restrictions, and get LibreOffice instead.
If you take a close look at Microsoft's new Office licensing, it's crystal clear: Microsoft no longer wants you to own your office software. They want you to rent it. So, why not get LibreOffice for free instead?
You don't have to believe me, the open-source, Linux guy. I quote Ed Bott, ZDNet's Microsoft maven, "You can no longer buy Office, Microsoft’s flagship product, on removable media. You can’t even download offline installer files for the three retail editions of Office: Home and Student, Home and Business, and Professional."
But, wait, there's more, much more. "Multi-PC editions are no longer available," and "Your perpetual license is locked to one PC." Your PC goes up in smoke? Too bad, you can't legally or physically reinstall "your" copy of Office on another PC.
Why is Microsoft doing this? Well, as Bott explained in an earlier article, Microsoft is applying the classic 'carrot and stick' approach to force you to rent Microsoft Office instead of buying it. The bottom line is it will cost you more to buy Office and you'll get less for your money than if you subscribe to Office annually. That's great for Microsoft. Lousy for you and your company.
Call me old-fashioned, but I like "owning" my software. I like picking and choosing where I can install it and how I use it. And, also call me sensible. I can pay $150 a year for Office 365 Small Business Premium forever and a day or I can use LibreOffice for free forever and use it anyway and anywhere I want.
Sure, they're not the same thing. Office 365 Small Business Premium comes with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, and Access. LibreOffice 4.0 comes with Writer (Word); Calc (Excel); Impress (PowerPoint); and Base (Access). LibreOffice doesn't have equivalents to OneNote or Outlook. On the other hand, you can always use Thunderbird instead of Outlook and LibreOffice includes Draw, a graphics program.
So, unless your business depends on OneNote, which is just fancy note-taking software, I don't see any good reasons to making MS-Office a perpetual part of your IT budget. Besides, if note-taking really is a big deal for you, may I suggest Evernote instead?
Document format compatibility between the two office suites remains an issue, but it's much less of one than it used to be. Microsoft has gotten better at working with LibreOffice's native Open Document Format (ODF) and LibreOffice has gotten the hang of working with Microsoft's OpenXML format.
To me, it all comes down to whether you want to be a renter or a "buyer." When the cost of buying is zero, I think anyone who can shake themselves from the delusion that they must use Microsoft Office because they always have will know which is the wisest course.
Related Stories:
Kick off your day with ZDNet's daily email newsletter. It's the freshest tech news and opinion, served hot. Get it.
Talkback
Loverock davidson will be here any second with something special to say
http://www.libreoffice.org/#0
Try IBM Lotus Symphony
Lotus Syphony is dead
but Apache OpenOffice 4.0 needs to be finished first.
So predictable
The best office suite there is
Compatibility with anything out there
Assurance of bug fixes
Better interoperability
An Office suite well integrated with Cloud storage and collaboration
The list goes on but I am already tired of pointing the obvious. For about a buck a day… It really doesn’t matter that there is a price tag. Please remember that nothing is free. Nothing.
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, can you please write about how the Open source community is stealing designs and concepts from the proprietary software industry every single day? The only basis on which we can tell if Libre Office is good is how close it is to MS Office. That’s pretty lame. Or maybe are you preparing another article to remind us again how bad the Surface is?
office suite
Where would they be?
I am so tired of pro Microsoft people.
This MS developers point of view
What MS does not realize is that outside of the "1st world" countries, broadband access is, or at least, can be, very patchy and in addition to this, many customers still do not trust placing all their data in the cloud - and can one honestly blame them given the amount of highly publicized data breaches lately?
So, from a long lived MS fanboy and member of the partner network, let me assure you that I am irritated enough to be looking at alternatives to MSO and will do the same for any other product that tries to dictate to me or my customers what we should and should not do, so much so that I have persuaded a customer today to install LO and Thunderbird on 2 new laptops as a trial.
There is no requirement to use the cloud
U.S. Broadband is 1st world????
If the "cloud" is going to be Microsoft's business strategy, they better start thinking about how they are going to fund optical fiber to everyone's desktop.
And, can you imagine needing to edit a presentation on the road and not be able to access Office because you can't get a reliable internet connection? Talk about putting all your eggs in the same basket!!!
Best?
Yes
Are compatiblility and interoperability really 2 different points?
My company recently got forced into buying MS 2010, just before 2013 got released in order to be able to use the macros in 1 file.
Almost all documents written in MS Office 2007 display and print differently in MS Office 2010. While installing MS Office 2010 we found a disclaimer saying that documents created by MS Office 2010 on Xp would look different in MS Office 2010 on Win7.
So, the MS world's idea of interoperability is that everyone has to be using the same version of their office on the same version of their OS as each other or else it wont work.
Regards from
Tom :)
Umm...assurance of bug fixes? Well, no.....
Better interoperability???
Don't be fooled, their very first strategy is to lock you in and squeeze you out. All this for a word processor and a spreadsheet. Imaging you already paid for 15 ! releases.
Many measure "interoperability"/"compatability" with an MS rule
Meanwhile, users of MS Office software can't even rely on MS Office being able to open documents created in MS Office and saved in MS OOXL "standard" formats -- so they keep a copy or two of Open Office or Libre Office handy, to rescue those MS Office documents that MS Office won't open.
It's a rather schizophrenic situation -- but as long as people are willing to let Microsoft make -- and break -- the rules in such blatant fashion, it's going to remain a mess (and Microsoft will continue rake in loads more cash than their products merit).
funny
Also, I bought a Surface pro a few days ago and it's a SUPERB PC. It's happily replacing my Macbook Pro, and I'm not looking back.
Steven J. Vaughn-Nichols is a relic stuck in the past. I'm amazed that anyone would pay him to write anything about technology, anywhere. He's like one of those angry old geezers who goes into meltdown every time he needs to flip a calendar page. What a whiner.
Do I have to do this again?
Word's master document feature has been broken for 10 years. Using it on long documents WILL corrupt your file. Even the author of the MS Word Bible advises readers to simply not use it. This is "the best"? Developers of the original Sun Office were told they'd have to use the word processor to write the documentation when done:-), so it has no problem handling several hundred page documents with ease.
You don't even want me to go into all of the problems with Access and its ancient, frozen-in-time Visual Basic 6 engine.
Compatibility? Through Office XP Word files saved the margin info as an offset of whatever the default printer was on the machine you saved on. That meant that if you opened the file with the SAME VERSION OF WORD on a machine with a significantly different default printer, your document would be messed up! OpenOffice dealt with this by surveying default printers and then taking an average value that they used to open Word documents with. This often meant that OPEN OFFICE REPRODUCED THE DOCUMENT BETTER THAN WORD ITSELF when opened on a different machine!
Access 2000 couldn't open Access 97 files without converting them on disk - even if you didn't save. Obviously this would be a disaster in a business with mixed copies; touch a 97 file with 2000 and now no one with 97 could use it anymore. Many users skipped 2000 as a result. Access 2003 couldn't open 97 files at all, nor could you install 97 side by side! It wasn't until Access 2007 that MS finally gave users a version that could non-destructively open Access 97 files, a mere ten years later.
Assurance of bug fixes? See above. Go tell that to statisticians!
Interoperability? With what? Other proprietary MS products? When Apple transitioned to Intel, MS removed VBA from the office suite for several years because it was tied directly to the PowerPC architecture and the Intel version in Windows was directly tied into Windows. MS developers don't understand the concept of "interoperability". In fact, we're seeing this again since VBA isn't available on Windows RT either, for presumably the same reason. Office can't even interoperate with Office, much less function cross-platform. Meanwhile, one can run LibreOffice on many OSes and architectures - including ARM, without losing features. They have their own scripting langauge, but they also offer Javascript, Beanshell (like a scripting Java) and python. That's a lot more interoperable with other products/services than proprietary, deprecated VBA.
I can understand how people can become rabid fans if they're using an underdog. I'll never understand the mentality of someone who identifies with and roots for the bully or the monopoly. Low self-esteem? I don't know. But your perception of Office (tellingly without a single example to back it up) has no resemblance to reality.
Let's just tackle this one step at a time.
The only office suite there was for a long time because of anti-competitive practices by Microsoft, removing the crown from Wordperfect by blocking API access to Win95. This is still trailing through the courts.
- Compatibility with anything out there
Compatibility with itself as long as it's a more recent version. Even older versions of Office have difficulties.
- Assurance of bug fixes
Nope. Microsoft fix what they find "commercially viable". That isn't all bugs. Three versions of Office to get their own ISO version of OOXML right? Not what I expect from a product lifecycle.
- Better interoperability
With itself. And only if a newer version. Rather than interoperate, MS went as far to stuff ballots in an ISO process to make itself a standard.
- An Office suite well integrated with Cloud storage and collaboration
Haven't tried it and probably won't. Google's efforts have led to a smear by the Microsoft which tells me it's good competition.
- The list goes on...
Go on...
And this BS about the Open Source community stealing designs and concepts... If you're going to throw accusations at the community, at least back it up with evidence.
Because people will send you office documents and expect them sent back
They are good, but they are not MSoffice when it comes to opening MS documents. When I send things out electronically, I always check it in MS first so I know how they will see it.
There's nothing I can't do, and I prefer the traditional layout. But so long as people use MS by default, you need to check formatting. Additionally everyone knows how to use office, businesses want to avoid training costs.
If apache open office does go fully no java in future releases it may gain more traction; many IT guys in the industry almost have a heart attack at the mention of java, even though both projects are very quick with security patches and there is no wild malware.