Another Office Alternative

MiTEG writes "The Washington Post has an article on a cheaper alternative to Microsoft's Office Suite, ThinkFree Office. Currently selling for $50, their product also includes a one year subscription to Cyberdrive, a 20 MB web file-storage service. While it's no StarOffice, this glowing review may help people realize that Microsoft is not the only option." 'Glowing review' probably isn't the right term to use, since the reviewer found quite a few faults.

Alternatives

[Anonymous Coward]

There are a list of alternatives at fuckmicrosoft.com [fuckmicrosoft.com]

Major faults in the article....

[palfrey]

The open-source world has produced a few free Office-compatible suites, but they, in turn, don't run on either Windows or the Mac OS.

Hmm... let's see. OpenOffice for one. It's running quite happily on my Windows machine here. Only gripe I've ever had with it was it's conversion to StarOffice files so I could print them out on my Uni's printer (didn't handle the page margins, but I've never worked out how to get that sorted with StarOffice anyways)

Re:I'm underwhelmed

[jeffy124]

the reason swing is slow is because it has maintain prtability between windowing systems (GNOME vs KDE, for example) and OSs (like Windows vs Solaris). As a result, the code becomes a little bloated in getting everybody supported equally.

AWT, the original gui package, ran ok for the runtime environment it had, but was very feature limited, as they only implemented something everybody had.

Swing, OTOH, implementes every gui widget you can think of, and uses the Java 2D graphics package instead of the native windowing system (although that too has changed). When I said earlier that Swing was improved in 1.4, it was actually this 2D package that was improved.

Chances are high that the ThinkFree suite was implemented for Java 1.3 since 1.4 was just released within the past month or two.

Re:File formats are more important

[Evro]

Pdf is ok, but again the file format itself is proprietary

PDF is not proprietary; it is an open standard [google.com]. The problem with PDF is that it is not editable, so is not very useful for sending back and forth for editing purposes.

Not only

[RageMachine]

Not only does it require java, which is quite sluggish on 600mhz, but it also installed itself ,without asking, directly to C:. I don't use C for anything but the OS. I wanted it installed to D:\Program Files where I keep everything organized, and away from the OS. It was uninstalled immediatly.

LaTeX

[jacobb]

Absolutely agreed. The only problem with them is the learning curve, which is quite on the steep side. But as long as you took the time to get acquainted with linux, learning LaTeX is easy by comparison.
Virtually all technical papers [arxiv.org] are written using LaTeX.

Of course, it's not really suited for writing the quick english assignment, but then again, why use Word for that? Any of the others work perfectly.

Columnist replies...

[robp]

Thanks for the comments on my review (although I really didn't expect it to draw a mention here, as opposed to my piece on the CBDTPA [washingtonpost.com] a week ago).

To answer a couple of points people have raised:

* Spell-checking: ThinkFree Office has a spell checker, but it doesn't flag misspellings as you type them, Word-style. You have to invoke the spell-checker "by hand." (My editor was afraid my description here might not have been clear enough. Guess he was right :)

* Importance of word count: Guilty as charged! I write for a living and I *need* this feature to do my job. Since a word count isn't exactly a difficult feature to support (as opposed to, say, revision tracking), I don't think it's out of line to expect it.

* Other Office alternatives: I left out AbiWord because it is a) just a word processor, not a full suite, and b) it's OS X compatibility is only available if you install an X11 server, which is a lot of work to ask of a home user (the target reader for my column).

I am planning on a review StarOffice whenever 6.0 ships, most likely as part of a comparison with OpenOffice.

Any other questions, y'all know where to reach me...

- R

Re:File formats are more important

[kaisyain]

Yes, PDF is proprietary, unless you mean something other than what the rest of us English speakers mean when we say proprietary. According the specification that Adobe has released, "Adobe owns the copyright in the data structures, operators, and the written specification for the particular interchange format called the Portable Document Format. These elements may not be copied without Adobe's permission. Adobe will enforce its copyright."

Adobe has simply chosen to give limited right to use copyrighted intellectual property and published the file format specification. Just because something has a published, publicly available definition does not make it an open standard. For instance, no one would call CIFS an open standard, even though Microsoft has chosen to give limited right to use copyrighted and patented intellectual property to some people.

HELOOOO!!! Have any of you used this app?

[swagr]

Well, there are several of premature remarks here. "Java is slow", "it's not free", "it's not Office/StarOffice/KOffice", etc...

Just to let you all know. I actually tried it.
I used it to whip up an updated version of my resume, and saved in in rtf, doc, and html. I then proceeded to open the doc and rtf in Word, and the html in various browsers, only to find they all looked exactly as expected.

I thought that was rather nice.