In spite of the significant price difference, Office outsold the others by a factor of three or more. To make several intertwined stories short, Borland Office for Windows 2. Novell became embroiled in a nasty antitrust suit against Microsoft, hotly debated to this day , which Microsoft won. Novell sold PerfectOffice to Corel in , but the final appeal to the U. Supreme Court was turned down just last month. No discussion of the evolution of WordPerfect would be complete without an update.
Not roadkill. Not at all. WordPerfect Office X7 -- including Version 17 of the venerable word processor -- appeared just last month. Nor is it related to Lotus SmartSuite.
Both are discussed in earlier slides. Reuse, repurpose, recycle. Unfortunately, the renamed Corel Write, Corel Calculate, and Corel Show can handle simple Office documents but fall to pieces on anything complex. Few lament the passing of Microsoft Works, but in its day, it served an important purpose: To convince Microsoft customers that they should spend real money for the real Office.
In my experience, not many people took the bait. The final version, 9. Others simply succumbed to a better way of working. Even the old-timers -- the Electric Pencils and VisiCalcs -- held on for many years past their prime, only to be swept away as Windows and Office cleared out the clutter. Martin notwithstanding, Office has raised the bar.
Could happen. Did we miss your favorite trainwreck? More Office-fried crispy critters? Tell us in the comments. Here are the latest Insider stories. More Insider Sign Out. Sign In Register. Sign Out Sign In Register. Latest Insider. Check out the latest Insider stories here. More from the IDG Network. All Slides. Word processors: Early DOS word processors.
Word processors: WordStar. Word processors: MultiMate. Word processors: WordPerfect for Windows. Spreadsheets: VisiCalc. Spreadsheets: Lotus Spreadsheets: SuperCalc. Spreadsheets: CalcStar. Spreadsheets: Microsoft Mutiplan. Spreadsheets: Quattro. Spreadsheets: Quattro Pro for Windows.
Presentations: Harvard Graphics. Presentations: Full Impact. Integrated suites: Context MBA. Integrated suites: Ashton-Tate Framework. Indonesian Eurotalk Talk Now! Irish Eurotalk Talk Now! Italian Eurotalk Talk Now! Japanese Eurotalk Talk Now! Learn Spanish Eurotalk Talk Now! Mandarin Eurotalk Talk Now! Norwegian Eurotalk Talk Now! Polish Eurotalk Talk Now!
Portuguese Eurotalk Talk Now! Romanian Eurotalk Talk Now! Spanish Eurotalk Talk Now! Swedish Eurotalk Talk Now! Thai Eurotalk Talk Now! Turkish Eurotalk Talk Now! Sproul Collection 1 Logos R. Softkey Religious Clipart 2 - discontinued - see Art Explosion Transparent Language Learn Chinese Now! You can also add tables, clip art and links.
OneNote, PowerPoint and Excel are similarly limited. The Excel tools in particular contain only very basic options for editing graphs and, while this application has formula autocomplete, there is no option to insert a formula from a list.
Clearly then, Office Web Apps will only give you the ability to make very basic documents, and is principally designed to store and allow document viewing. We think Microsoft has short-changed users here, as companies like Zoho have much less financial muscle but offer so much more.
Obviously, Microsoft would encourage you to integrate Office Web Apps with Microsoft Office, but if you're willing to go to a little effort it's not your only choice. If you're already using Microsoft Office or later there are good reasons to do so. The service integrates directly with the desktop version, allows you to upload documents of up to 50MB, and also gives you access to MSN Messenger and unlimited storage in Hotmail.
There is no doubt, though, that Google Docs offers better online editing tools. Google Docs is also a comparatively stable product, whereas Office Web Apps for SkyDrive seems to be a product in transition to Office On balance then, we think Google Docs has the edge.
If you don't, move along. Editors' rating: 6. OpenOffice has had some ups and downs recently , with Oracle's buyout of Sun , and the forking of LibreOffice from the project due to concerns about how Oracle would treat the project and community. Officially named OpenOffice. It now belongs to the Apache corporation , something that has eased the minds of many open source advocates. Whether LibreOffice and OpenOffice will come under the one roof again remains to be seen — for now they will remain separate.
While opinions vary, most regard Microsoft Office as more sophisticated and feature-heavy than OpenOffice. This is unsurprising considering the massive time lead and financial advantage Microsoft Office has over the OpenOffice developer community. As a rough guide, expect to find the features in OpenOffice 3.
As OpenOffice was designed as a direct rival to Microsoft Office, the interface and applications allow for easy migration. Expect to find several OpenOffice applications to be almost complete clones of their Microsoft Office counterparts. There are, however, some important differences that should be noted.
That means that, using standard settings, documents saved in OpenOffice Writer will have the ". This may cause a major headache to users if they are regularly emailing attachments outside the business.
In addition, more pragmatic administrators may expect compatibility gaps as both applications go through incremental upgrades.
As standard, OpenOffice offers six different applications. For the purpose of this round-up, we'll focus on the most commonly used programs: Writer, Calc and Impress. A notable feature of all three applications is an easy "Export to PDF" function.
When first using Writer, you may notice a lack of green and red underlining; while OpenOffice contains both a spelling and grammar checker, it does not actively underline in the same way Microsoft Office does. Another interesting addition to Writer is a bibliographical database that may be a lifesaver to those writing a thesis or other long academic work.
For those upgrading, version 3. These features also translate into Impress — OpenOffice's presentation program — which received improved slide handling with the 3. This makes it a little prettier and a little more intuitive than PowerPoint , but otherwise expect it to be very similar in its use and function.
For those migrating to OpenOffice for the first time, one thing you may be looking for are templates; the OpenOffice template repository is well worth a look. Calc should meet the needs of all but the most demanding users. While it features fewer charts and graphs than Microsoft Office , it allows greater customisation of those it has.
The latest version of Calc saw the introduction of support for columns, an equation solver and custom error bars for charts. It's also available in over languages and allows third-party extensions , which can add file compatibility and language support. The latest version of OpenOffice, 3. Fit and trim it is indeed, with the Wintel download only MB, and installation is quick and painless.
As a free program, OpenOffice obviously offers incredible value. However, as user bases become large, minor incompatibilities may become major headaches. Further, the consistency of documents shared outside the company may be a point of concern given the ubiquitous nature of Microsoft Office. Its free nature means it is also unsupported beyond general help via the OpenOffice.
If you're after a free, fully featured alternative that allows easy migration from Microsoft Office, then OpenOffice is for you. Editors' rating: 8. Its parent company, Hancom, clearly had easy migration in mind when creating it. It looks, feels and works so much like Microsoft Office it's hard to call it anything but a clone.
Based on this limited availability, we instead looked at the desktop version, ThinkFree Office 4. The application suite is a small download 56MB for Windows , and is easy and quick to install. Inside you'll find three applications: Calc, Write and Show. Once you get up and running in ThinkFree Office 4 you might be forgiven for thinking you were back in Microsoft Office The two packages are remarkably similar, right down to the placement of individual items in sub-menus.
Building on this theme, all three ThinkFree Office applications save in the now legacy Microsoft Office formats; ". Spend some time with ThinkFree, however, and you will begin to notice some differences or, rather, omissions. After a little while, ThinkFree feels like a version of Microsoft Office with the least-used features removed. In particular, we were frustrated by the lack of Mail Merge or the ability to customise the look of tables in Write. While there is a spell checker, there is no thesaurus or grammar checker.
Similarly, we found graphs and charts in ThinkFree Calc lacked the sophistication we found in Excel or OpenOffice 3. ThinkFree Calc featured all the functions we could ever need with over available , but we struggled to make our data look good using the application. For example, we couldn't seem to rotate the labels of our graph axis. Show is just as basic, providing a stripped-down version of the features available in Microsoft PowerPoint However, it still includes a range of handy features, such as animation effects and the ability to play both the audio and video files embedded in presentations.
Finally, it includes an option called "Slide Master", which gives you access to a number of attractive slide themes. Compared to other office applications we've used, ThinkFree performs sluggishly. All three applications also seem to lack templates of any kind, which is a big disappointment.
ThinkFree Office 4 performs well when opening Microsoft Office files. However, we were disappointed to see that it offers no support for the ODF standard, a major omission.
We were a bit disappointed by the Help Centre, as it contained no wiki or forum of any kind, and only provided answers for a very limited set of questions. It's hard to compete with OpenOffice. The price will also give you over a year's subscription to either Zoho or Google Docs, both of which offer online storage and collaboration.
Given this, it's hard to recommend ThinkFree against the competition. While it gets no points for originality or style, it is cheap. Editors' rating: 5. The name Zoho is a deliberate misspelling of SOHO, or small-office, home-office — the product's target market.
However, as Zoho's application suite has expanded, the offering has begun to look as if it's targeted at larger businesses. Zoho launched as an online word processor back in — in the good old days when a cloud was something you saw in the sky on a rainy day. Fast-forward six years and the Zoho developers have been working hard, managing to launch an additional 15 applications since then.
Taking a closer look, there is little that a small to medium business might need that Zoho doesn't offer. Available are take a deep breath! However, for the purpose of this review we'll stick to Zoho Docs, which includes Writer, Sheet and Show. Unlike Google Docs, Zoho segregates its applications, meaning that to create a document you go to www. Confusingly, documents created in any given Zoho application are only visible in that application. In order to view all your documents you'll have to log in to www.
The good news is that adjusting to Zoho Docs is worth the effort. While Zoho Docs and Google Docs run a close race in term of functionality, the little extras in Zoho may save you a lot of time and frustration. For example, expect to find pivot tables in Zoho Sheet as well as a Thesaurus and the ability to add page numbers in Zoho Writer.
Like Google Docs, Zoho Docs allows users to share and work collaboratively on a single document — a great innovation that makes SaaS highly attractively to many users. Unlike Google Docs, Zoho suffers from a lack of good-quality templates, with those available looking exceptionally bland. While Zoho and Google Docs offer many of the same innovations, many of their limitations are also shared.
Like Google Docs, Zoho limits the size of files that can be uploaded. The current limit is 10MB for documents and spreadsheets, and 30MB for presentations. As Zoho can extract zip files , a workaround may be to zip your larger files before you upload them. When uploading a slide presentation into Zoho Show, we were pleased to see that all but three of the slides came out as they appeared in Microsoft Office.
So while Zoho's compatibility with other office suites is good, don't expect it to be perfect. Also, uploading some documents to Zoho can generate an email notification, which can create a rather annoying spam machine that is a pain to disable. While Zoho Docs doesn't always import your files perfectly, it can import and export them from a very broad range of file formats.
Likewise, expect to find broad file format support in Zoho Sheet and Show. Support for Zoho Docs is available via email, with Zoho offering to respond with 24 hours. However, you only get 1GB of storage and additional storage costs can hit you hard. Storage for other Zoho applications may be even more expensive again, so users should investigate carefully and watch out for hidden costs. Businesses looking for a secure SaaS office suite should take a serious look at Zoho Docs, as it offers a huge range of applications, great functionality and good support at a very reasonable price.
The fact that Zoho Docs is a SaaS offering means additional security, great collaborative features and the ability to roll services such as email, CRM, office applications, calendar and chat applications into a single provider.
However, like all online office suites, Zoho Docs still doesn't produce documents with quite the same professional shine as Microsoft Office or OpenOffice. Using SasS may result in limited availability while on the move and lag for users on slower 3G or shared internet connections. There is a lot to like about Zoho Docs.
Businesses looking for a robust SaaS office suite should take a serious look. After examining eight competitors to Microsoft Office, it is clear that despite some very high-quality competition, Microsoft continues to set the standard in the desktop office software market, with Office leading the way.
But this premium product comes at a premium price. For many individuals Microsoft Office offers a lot of features that they don't need, at a price they don't want. If you've decided to jump ship from Microsoft Office, then there is really only one question you need to answer: "Are you ready to migrate to the cloud? If the answer is no, then your product is OpenOffice. As a fully featured alternative to Microsoft Office it's superb, offers great features, compatibility, add-ons and language support.
If the answer is "yes", then Google Docs and Zoho are both great choices. If you want a leader in office SaaS, it's really hard to go past Zoho. Of course, these office suites can also be mixed and matched. For example, Microsoft Office can be put together with Google via Google Cloud Connect to give you the power of both Microsoft Office's feature set and the collaborative tools of Google Docs.
Whatever happens, it is clear that online alternatives will increasingly become the leading tools for creating and managing office documents. On that basis, our overall choice is Zoho, as it is the most fully featured SaaS office suite we reviewed.
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