Shahid Online - Tech Corner

Yes, you heard me. To celebrate this festive season, SoftMaker has made their excellent alternative to Microsoft Office freely available. On top of this they will donate to charity with every download. With such a commendable act, why not contribute towards a good cause and try out an Office alternative. So head over to Load and Help ( http://www.loadandhelp.de/home-en.html ).

Having released SoftMaker Office 2008, the makers are making the 2006 version available free of charge to Windows and Linux users. However a small omission is SoftMaker Presentations, the alternative for Microsoft PowerPoint. This move provides users with another alternative for Microsoft, contending with OpenOffice.org by being able to work directly with Office2007 files. Linux users are also provided with the opportunity to Beta test the Linux version of SoftMaker Office 2008. Visit SoftMaker's website for more info.

Ever since Sun MicroSystems released the code to StarOffice, it kicked up a storm in the open source world and we saw the birth of OpenOffice (OOo). It is not about being open source, but this broke down the barriers of sharing documents and collaboration. Microsoft upped the ante with the recognition of collaboration for business and release a free service - Microsoft Office Live Workspace - which is currently in Beta. However, open source has given us a reason to shun the offerings from Microsoft and seek alternatives. In this article I intend on presenting this to you. Office Alternatives First off, what are the alternatives to Microsoft Office? The first choice is (obviously) OpenOffice (OOo). This application is a complete office suite to compete with Microsoft Office: Microsoft Word = OpenOffice Writer Microsoft Excel = OpenOffice Calc Microsoft Access = OpenOffice Base Microsoft PowerPoint = OpenOffice Impress Microsoft Visio = OpenOffice Draw (kind of, but is a welcome a...