Sudhir Gupta swears by it. "MS Office changed my life," he says. "Before it arrived, all I had was a noisy typewriter that took me hours to use, hurt my fingers, and kept my neighbours up till the wee hours."
Yes, word processors did change a lot, didn't they? Remember the days before they turned up? Not a pleasant memory. Thing is, with the overwhelming popularity of MS Office, most people have yet to realise that other options exist too, and free of cost at that.
Take the StarOffice Application Suite, for example. It delivers a complete set of easy-to-use office productivity tools, including StarOffice Writer for professional documents, StarOffice Calc for calculations, StarOffice Impress for presentations, StarOffice Draw for graphics, StarOffice Base for data management, the StarOffice Schedule organiser, and StarOffice Mail, along with a number of other free downloads.
Star Office 5.2 Suite is compatible with Microsoft Office, and comes with all the features you may need, like spell-checking, word completion, merging, tables, columns, indexes, etc. It's not as powerful as Microsoft Word or Word Perfect, but hey, it's free. Why complain? Sceptics can read a few reviews here before clicking the Download icon.
Other alternatives can be found at ZDNet. It lists software like Eudora 5.1, AbiWord 0.7.13, 602Pro PC Suite 2000b, the StarOffice Personal Edition 5.2, and Pegasus Mail (32-bit) 3.12c: fully-functional, comparatively smaller in size and, best of all, free.
Of these, the 602Pro PC Suite is also fully compatible with Office, comes with the same tools, and includes a graphics editor called 602Photo designed for digital camera and scanner image editing. You can read some more about it, and download, here.
Let's say you still swear by your MS Office software though. Go ahead and take it, but at a lower price. CheaperOffice.com is dedicated to locating the cheapest prices for Microsoft Office products. It has an Office Buyers Guide, mentions options that 'Microsoft doesn't talk about too much,' and shows you how to buy it using ways that are perfectly legal but more economically viable.
Microsoft has some information too, on how to buy its products and get the best deals. CNET Shopper looks at pricing and availability, while locating bargains and the best deals for MS Office software.
There you have it, then. Life beyond MS Office. What do you want to do today?
For more office software from Rediff Search, click here
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