The end of Office

I think that 2007 was a watershed year for the end of the Microsoft Office empire. There are so many quality tools out there now that provide viable alternatives to Office, that it is no longer necessary to have Office. The NY Times talked about it recently. The only gates to the revolution are the institutional acceptance of Office, which demands that papers and documents at schools and businesses be turned in using Word, Excel, etc. Thus, the issue of interoperability is the key ~ can documents be saved into .doc format, for example, and look ok? To me, PDF solves this issue, but professors and managers don’t all have, or know how to use, Acrobat Professional, and so the need for word processors continues.

Let me review some of the tools that I use that are free, and in some cases more aesthetically pleasing than Office.

1. Buzzword. I can’t say enough about Buzzword, I just love it. Buzzword saves to .doc, and .docx amongst other formats. It doesn’t save to PDF yet, but should soon. The interface is elegant, the font choices, although limited, are very nice, and best of all, it’s free.

2. Adobe Share. Share allows you to upload PDFs and share them with people, or embed them.

3. Google Apps. Google Docs, Spreadsheets, Page Creator and Presentation give you the free ability to do a lot of what Office does. I’m not wild about the Google interface, it looks a little cartoonish and doesn’t do all the things that Word does by a long stretch. It does export to Word, Open Office, and PDF. Again, it’s free.

4. Lovely Charts. Sort of a Visio alternative, I just signed up so I’m not sure about it yet. But I think the interface is clean (built on Flash of course). Some day perhaps it will export to Visio, but who cares? It’s an alternative.

5. OpenOffice. If you want to download a large Office alternative you can use OO. It is bulky, and not accessible online like Buzzword, but it does a lot.

6. IBM Lotus Symphony. This group of tools should be available for Macs this year, right now it is only on PCs. It’s sort of slow and a resource hog, but it gets the job done like Word does.

With all of that said, I have been using Office 2007 at work recently, and I really like it. But I wouldn’t want to pay for it at home. Microsoft ought to get radical and make it free, then we would see a true revolution. I’m also using iWork 08 at home, and I love, love, love Pages. So there are a lot of options out there, but I think we are living through the end of the Microsoft hegemony.