Alternate Office Package with same functionality as Microsoft Office

[PearlEE]

As a small business, Microsoft offers no pricing discounts for their various office packages, either through open licenses (500 seats). So I thought I would put the question out there about what others might be using. I know there are on-line options, and I have tried Open Office. Your thoughts would be great.

 

[fumei]

You have tried OpenOffice and rejected that option?

Gerry
My paintings and sculpture

 

[fneily]

If you're not into advance programming, you can go to computer shows and pick up Office 2000 for approx. $50, Office XP(2002) for approx. $150. Most business' don't have the latest version of Office due to the license fees.

 

[PearlEE]

Yes, I did try Open Office. However, if the file is created in Office 2003 and then opened in Open Office, works greats. But when you try to edit it, that is were the problem begins.

 

[JBruyet]

Open Office is probably going to be as close as you can get to MS Office. There is definitely a learning curve, and not all of the MS functionality is in Open Office, but IMHO Open Office seems be a stable, very functional alternative. I've created documents in MS Word 2003 and opened them in Open Office and been surprised at how well Open Office "reads" Word documents. I've even created Word documents in Open Office and opened them in Word and they opened fine.

FWIW,

Joe

 

[fumei]

Yeah, and macros can go way off into left field.

Still, there are not many other viable alternatives to MSOffice.

Gerry
My paintings and sculpture

 

[Beowulf005]

Microsoft does offer a discount on office if you buy more then 5
Small business website for Microsoft

When frustrated remember, in the computer world there is almost always a backdoor.

 

[eyec]

you could try Word Perfect if you are a governmental type. they seem to like it.

another alternative is to save all of your documents (no matter what you make them with) in PDF. as long as you don't need them to be interactive.

there are free pdf converters and some really inexpensive packages for this.

 

[PearlEE]

Yes, we found several great packages to create pdfs. Nitro Express ($49), Nitro Pro ($99)<- allows you to create fillable forms and the PDFRedirect (FREE) if you just need to create pdfs.

Wordperfect was always my favorite. Everything is so ingrained with Microsoft that it makes it hard to change once you have purchased so many seats of MSOffice packages. I will try the Small Business site.