I have been using Keynote since it came out as a standalone program, and it is sooooo much better than Power Point. I am going to buy iWork08 and try pages and numbers in an attempt to get away from Microsoft completely. If Pages and Numbers is as excellent as Keynote, I know I will be pleased to use them.

I'm taking the very wobbly position that let's assume Google's products are far superior to Office inf features/functionality and experience.

It appears that most people have an emotional reaction towards Microsoft/Google.

Some questions to consider.

1. If Office were free would you use another product, i.e, M/S still has a lot of room to play with price.

2. Have any one of you actually talked to a Google customer service engineer?

3. Do you know the Google customer support hotline, does one exist?

4. To win one does not need to have a superior product, they need to offer a superior experience. If you look at Microsoft's product line up you'll see that M/S does not have the best product in any segment. But their products are probably in the top 3 or 5.

M/S then takes a 3 or a 4 product and wraps an eco system around it, re sellers, MS Certified Engineers/Technicians, education programs, customer support, warranty to make their product a service.

So it's highly likely that your Grandkids will be using M/S Office. Unless someone attacks the M/S ecosystem and service.. just technology/price based competion will never win, i.e. 1 year later this will just have been another Google Meteor.

I've pretty much been sold on iWork whenever I upgrade to a new macbook hopefully in a few months.

For what I need a word processor and spreadsheet for, this is more than enough for me. Also combined with google, if I need to make sure anything is available remotely, I can always upload to google apps.

Now, there's an idea for Apple, upload to google apps. I have an idea that won't be happening though, considering it might be a little too much competition for .Mac.

What about OpenOffice.org No review on it?

I used Office 2007 at work this past summer, and I was VERY pleased with the new interface. Useful options and buttons that had previously been hard to find are now much more accessible. The functionality Office offers is still much more than most home users need, but the user experience has been greatly improved for people at all levels.

"Web coordinates" I like the way that rolls off the tongue! And it's an accurate description for navigating to a particular location on the Internet.

Why didn't you mention this in your blog on alternatives to using "URL," Rob?

As Gmail gains traction among College Students (and it seems it hss), Google Docs is a natural extension for compatibility and collaboration. My Junior in HS daughter has been using it for collaboration with fellow students for over a year. They found it on their own.

Without the back-end MS Infrastructure, Office gives no clear reason to spend money on it. I already regret paying for my College son's copy of Office 2007; which I certainly would not have bought if it wasn't $85 for a student license.

Open Office is a legitimate alternative if you must have a stand alone.

Google now offers free copies of StarOffice from Sun. Full-featured word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, drawing, and database compatibile with MSOffice. Difficult to pass up that deal.

>If you look at Microsoft's product line up you'll see that M/S does not have the best product in any segment.

come on, who has a better email client than Outlook?

I've love to use Google Apps more, but I work on a notebook sometimes and don't always have internet availble everywhere I go, so if Google wants me to take them seriously they'll give me offline support.

My small office switched to StarOffice (except for Outlook). We find that we use Word less and less (mostly just write emails). Calc isn't as responsive as Excel which annoys me. There is just a tiny delay in moving around and editing which really bothers my workflow. I REALLY don't want to reward MS with my dollars anymore, when they make such abysmal crap (VISTA) so why hasn't ADOBE created an office suite? Indesign has one of the most intuitive, easy-to-use, powerful and discoverable interfaces of any app I've ever used.

PLEASE ADOBE rescue us with an englightned approach to word pro and spreadsheets!

Office is a massively powerful suite of software. It's absolutely extraordinary what you can do with it, with a little effort. 10 years ago I ran a huge conference

If I need to do low overhead ad hoc tasks like juggling some text for a letter, or adding a small number of numbers then the Google stuff is fine. They're giving me basic 21st century typewriter and calculator tools. If I want to be REALLY productive I use Office.

If your attention-span is longer than it takes to grumble about Microsoft, then you can learn to use Office to do all sorts of interesting and useful things. I also get to manipulate them with voice or digital pen.

The main point is to learn how to identify the right tools for the right jobs and look at the opportunities. [If you want to see worst example of improper use, send an email to a French embassy: the one line reply will come inside a Word file attachment, omitting all details of the prior correspondence.]

There are also other alternatives, including Microsoft Works which comes bundled on many PCs. Our kids at home use the latest version of Works for their homework and school projects.

Also, yesterday Microsoft "unveiled a $60 Web-based version of its new Microsoft Office Ultimate suite of applications that will be exclusively available to college students."

Sorry for the dropped sentence above.

Should read: 10 years ago I ran a huge conference using Office 95 with linked Access, Word and Excel documents. Some formulae, no VBA code. I must have done the work of about 12 people with that stuff. The free progs around today still don't match those features.

...been using OpenOffice for MAC and Windows without issue for a year. Spreadsheets and documents seem fully compatible with Word and Excel users. My MS-Office associates still have no idea I'm using OO!

I've used OO for home use since an early 1.x version (well over a year) and am very happy with it. It's not practical for my particular office environment, however. Have you ever tried to fill in a .doc containing form fields in OO? Good luck! I searched and searched for an answer and had none myself. Haven't tried in about nine months, but as of then, there was a VERY convoluted process of getting those blanks filled in.

Aside from that, the program is great, well written, never crashes and it appears very close to being as powerful as Office (with the exception of Outlook of course).

So I just bought a new pc and casually said yes to the MS Office software being offered (Home/Student) without double-checking that it included Outlook. Big mistake on my part esp since my Blackberry will not synch with Vista Mail nor will my Outlook files transfer. Am I the only one out there who did not know this?

It sure seemed like RIM and MS were trying to keep the non-synching issue a secret. Took me about 6 hours to figure it out and the reps did not even seem to realize ...

Additionally, after years of MS Office upgrades that are easy to migrate to, Vista has made using MS Programs (ppt, excel, word) less rote. I think it will be fine but I do have to build in extra time to navigate the new layout and features.

A modest suggestion - if you insist on using a PC, download OpenOffice. If you have a MAC, download NeoOffice. Both are completely free, open source software. They are 100% "Office" compatable and include open source versions of Word, Excel, Power Point, Access, Outlook, SQL, and more. Moreover, you can seamlessly convert files to/from other formats. Only someone with money to throw away would consider anything other than these two options.

Bravo - excellent perspective for this ongoing topic. Now, can you please do the same type of review/recommendation for free software that can create a GANTT chart without requiring a double masters in project management and art design coupled with $1000 in software for a simple way to show parts of a project against a timeline.

I would suggest paying some attention to SoftMaker Office 2007. I much prefer using their TextMaker to MS Word -- it's much faster and easier to work with, very stable, quite compatible in file formats. PlanMaker seems to match EXcel in many ways, but I have no call for using Spreadsheets. They now have a presentations program in beta. At softmaker.com. (I have no connection with their company; I'm just very happy using TextMaker. I work with research and book-length documents.)

OpenOffice is very cool -- I use it at home myself -- but the interface is not as fast or slick.

A friend swears by Abiword. I haven't checked it out myself. If you just need word processing, this is a viable alternative to M$ or OpenOffice. (Abiword is not a suite, though, just a WP.)

I'll try to answer some of the questions/comments raised here:

jwil (and other OpenOffice fans): I've reviewed OpenOffice before, and quite favorably at that. But for all of OpenOffice's success at matching Microsoft's feature set, it hasn't done anything to make office productivity any easier. And given the major interface improvements in Office 2007 (see my review), I'd say that OpenOffice now ranks as the most complicated, least intuitive productivity suite available.

M3 Sweatt: I thought about including Microsoft Works in this comparison, but there wasn't any room left in the story. As for the $60 Microsoft offer, the only I can find doesn't include any Web-based version of Office--it's a very steep educational discount that, unlike the Student and Home Edition, requires the buyer to hold a valid student ID.

MB: RIM's sync software is terrible--I wouldn't exclude it from blame for your sync problems.

Vienna: Before I even think about reviewing apps to create GANTT charts, you have to find me a whole 10 households in the D.C. area who use the things at home and on their own time :)

- RP

I agree with Rob's idea that we shouldn't necessarily use MS Office as the standard against which we judge all other products. But the problem, it seems to me, is that everyone's list of must-have features will be different (hence the bloat in Office itself -- people who use it at work might sometimes want to work from home, so even the home version has to track changes and do the other things the work version does...)

I think iWork has a lot of potential, but I couldn't imagine using Google Docs for anything serious. Wouldn't the lack of footnotes in Google Docs pretty much rule it out for high school and college kids?

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There go Mac Sales !

--- Karl Lingenfelder
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Rob brings up some good questions. My county's schools have access to MS Office through MEEC (http://www.meec-edu.org/).
It's installed on every computer, including those for PreK. Yet I'd bet that not even 12th graders or teachers use most of the software features. Could money have been saved here? Who footed the bill for MEEC?

To me, Google Docs and MS Word have distinctly different purposes. If I need to create a professional looking document, MS Word is the obvious choice and OpenOffice is a reasonable and free alternative. If I want collaboration with other people, Google Docs is the way to go. I commend Google for making something so simple yet useful. Support? Bah. It doesn't need support. There is nothing to go wrong.

While I'm a fan of iWork for MacOS X, and a steady user of NeoOffice, the ability to work both online and offline is interesting and useful.

Thus, it's worth taking a look at ThinkFree (thinkfree.com), which offers both offline and online versions of their office suite for both Windows and MacOS, including synchronization. If you're a Linux user, you can work online through Firefox and still share docs with colleagues on Windows or the Mac. All in all, it works pretty well and is a nice collaborative solution.

The biggest problem with all of the tools (including MS Office) lies in font differences across platforms since the size of 12 point type is slightly different on each operating system. A document with just the right look on one platform may be slightly "off" on another one. You have to pick the one you like best, then create PDF to make a documentation that appears consistently the same on all platforms.

Thanks to its relationship with Apple, Microsoft did a good job in transferring common word processing features to a Windows environment in Word. They did less well with spreadsheets in Excel, but, absent any serious competition, they caught up after a few releases. They bought an essentially untested database program to serve as the foundation for Access and they bought a dog of a graphics program to get to Powerpoint. Their genius as usual lay in marketing and promotion.

How many users actually needed an "office" on their home PCs? I'd guess 90% needed a word processor of some kind and perhaps 50% would be pleased if that word processor were compatible with whatever they used at work. For spreadsheets, I'd guess the need dropped to 40-50% but the compatibility issue gained in importance. For database and graphics I can't imagine either number is particularly important.

BUT, Microsoft knew that home users could influence corporate purchases, and if you look at the marketing done in the 80s and 90s -- and consider Microsoft's seeming laxity on the issue of copy protection at the time -- you'll recognize that they read their market well. How many companies ran committees to choose their corporate office software? How many committee members were partially influenced by the prospect of adding an "office" worth of software to their home PC at no cost?

Times have changed. The acquisition issue is less of a concern for individuals, but Microsoft is still the office "standard" for an astonishing number of companies, meaning that in the worst case they'll sell their trivial "upgrades" to their corporate accounts within a "service pack" or two.

I've had Office 2007 -- absent cost, like all previous versions -- since it was released. My guess is that a couple of thousand people showed up at the rollout festivities on the day I attended, each leaving with at least a free "professional" copy of Office.

Microsoft wins again, so what else is new? Your questions are smart. Why do we let ourselves be bamboozled by Gates & Co? Because it's easy, and because sometimes they let us think we're getting something for free.

Bill Carr: Excel was developed by MS on Apple platform first - what were they catching up with. Also, Access was not based on an external product the way that Powerpoint or Microsoft C (Lattice C) etc were.

I don't follow your argument that corporate committees somehow influenced home users to buy Office. Generally people get Works bundled with their OEM machines, the OEM version of Office comes at a premium.

Microsoft is great at marketing and promotion. But they also stick at developing and refining a product. Software upgrades of a product like Office are usually much more substantial than you'll see in any other sector: cars, electronics, whatever. If you can't see the benefit or the opportunity, don't use Office. Likewise don't buy a new model car or MP3 player. Companies that make high-value products don't just keep old products in inventory forever, they keep moving forward.

One thing I have always wondered is why we have separate spreadsheets, word processors, and presentation programs. Do we really need totally separate programs for these things? I can insert a table into a document. Why not a spreadsheet? I can insert pictures into both documents and presentations. Why do I need both programs for that? Over ten years ago I expected Microsoft to merge the products together, but if anything the line between them has gotten thicker, not thinner.

It's funny how many posters keep bringing up MS Office's superior capabilities for business, when Rob's article was about office suites for the casual home user. A Ferrari may be a vastly superior vehicle to a mini van but the latter is still the better and cheaper tool for dropping the kids off at school and making a Costco run. While an invaluable tool for serious business with a price tag > $100 (>$200 if you want Outlook) MS Office is a waste of money for most home users.

I've been using Open Office on Linux and XP boxes at home for the past few years and have found it to fit all of my needs. I've only run into a handful of issues when interacting with MS Office Documents for work. All of those have been with heavily animated power point presentation and I was "on the clock" at the time.
As to Outlook being a vastly superior email client: While I love its seamless integration of address book and calendar (especially for work), I still use Thunderbird for my home email because it does a much better job of filtering out junk mail.

I'm about to replace our 'common' computer with a mini (need more space on the counter and want to use current Linux based white box there to replace 10 year old P3 MythTV box), given iWork's $80 price tag and functionality mentioned above. I'll have to seriously consider it over just downloading NeoOffice.

Slar: You *can* insert a spreadsheet into a document, but you need to have a spreadsheet object (eg Excel) available to drop in.

I suspect that if all three document types were ever successfully merged, that most people would have trouble dealing with the trebling of functions you'd get in one program. There is certainly a lot of overlap already, but if people don't realize that, then that's one sign that they aren't dealing with the amount of features there today.

Usually the point is not to "make a document" - it's to accomplish some task(s). If I want to do include the results of some complex spreadsheeting into a document, it's usually easier to focus on that task and tools, and then link/paste the results into a text document or spreadsheet for presentation.

There's nothing stopping you doing presentations with Word (or Notepad). But if you want a set of tools to help you make presentations (rather than presentable documents) then Powerpoint is a better choice. Word processors are better at editing text that flows in a stream or preparing for printing. Presentation slides have more fixed boundaries and the tools allow you to work more with multimedia that don't work on a printed page.

It's a pity that the old binder functionality of Office is gone, because it made conceptualizing a unit of text docs and spreadsheets a bit easier. There are tools like OneNote that blur the boundary a bit more for personal note-taking, again focussed around the _task_ not the less important question of what shape my bit housing might be.

If you're using the wrong tools for the wrong job, then it's not a matter of Microsoft trying to put one over you (although all companies like to upsell). Consumers should be smart enough to figure out what they need - it's not like these are new products. PC word processors and spreadsheets have been around for a quarter century: no excuse for poor market research. But hey, people still go buy home handyman gadgets and kitchen applicances that are waaay more sophisticated than anything they need. What does that tell you?

The other problem with an all-in-one productivity program is screen real estate: How do you fit all the different commands on the screen? (Earlier attempts to make such a thing ran into a different issue: The resulting all-in-one behemoth took up too much memory at the time. Try reading up on the history of a software project called OpenDoc, for example.)

- RP

The Tower of Babel

From the start of the computer business, companies have tried to get us locked into their proprietary file formats, so we would feel trapped into continuing to buy their software or hardware. This has been true of every company at some time to varying extents.

Most of us have had the experience of opening a document, and discovering something has gone haywire - usually the formatting. Sometimes the document came from a competing product, sometimes just an older version of the software. On these very pages, I often get an ampersand in your news articles converted to an ampersand followed by the letters amp and then a semicolon. In fact I was unable to enter that string into this posting - it got converted back to a plain ampersand. This is not even involving any word processor. Governments have expressed concern that large numbers of documents now stored in their archives, or in the files of companies they are auditing, will be unavailable to them without sending the media to a specialist for expensive recovery and conversion.

Businesses and consumers should demand that all software now writing "documents," do so in one single industry standard format. The format should be changed only infrequently and by general agreement - the ISO may be a good mechanism for this. Then all future software revisions must promise to read the files from older versions without damage. I dread to ask for government intervention in this, but governments are big stakeholders in this - and their costs will be passed on to us in our taxes.

The red herring usually thrown at us is that this would "stifle innovation." View it in another way: if one or two big companies can promulgate a new file format whenever they wish, only fairly large companies will have the resources to quickly respond with changes to their own product. Thus any small software company, with for example a unique word processor, will lose too many sales before they can update their product, or spend too large a percentage of their budget, and go out of business. So It may be that lack of true industry standards for storage formats, stifles programming innovations.

Our company converted to OpenOffice about three years ago. We have never had a problem reading a file, nor have any of our customers ever suspected that we are a Microsoft-Office-free shop.

I still use Word Perfect for word processing, but the M$ steamroller has so fixed Access that we have a huge Access database. Spreadsheets we usually use excel but also use QuattroPro. Word Perfect is a much better product than Word, tho in X3 version they added a stupid set of web buttons across the top that I wish i could chisel off. Oh, I also use Netscape, which has a few more features than Mozilla FireFox. I'd love Netscape to give us an Outlook equivalent.
steve

>FROM: theador@verizon.net 9/19/07 0710

A couple weeks ago my question was asked;

What does the XLR symbol mean in Microsoft Office Word? When it blocks your data.

I use open office at home. It's free and great!

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