Open source applications which compete with MS Office!

MS Office is without a doubt the best office suite ever built and continues to get better and better with every new version. Be it the Office for Windows or MS Office ‘08 for Mac, it really is a wonder on both the platforms. However, the hefty price attached with it, gives nightmare to most of us or few people take the road of using pirated version of this beautiful package.

However, we don’t need to stick to MS Office anymore and we don’t need to use a pirated copy of it, when we can get all the features of it by using various open-source software and which work on almost all the platforms.

1. OpenOffice.Org : This wonderful open-source package can handle most of the work for us, which MS Office can do. Spreadsheet, Word Documents, Powerpoint presentations, Base (which is the alternative to MS Access), Math (alternative to Microsoft’s Equation editor). However, MS Office suite is much more than these applications only and we’ll find out that which other applications can help us over here.

2. MS Outlook alternatives : OpenOffice.Org misses an email client & Organizer which is basically known as Outlook in MS Office package. We can use two programs from Mozilla which solve our problem. One is ThunderBird (the email client) and SunBird (the calendar or organizer). These two programs are good enough that you won’t miss MS Outlook at all.

3. Microsoft OneNote : This is one software which doesn’t have a good open-source alternative, however you can use FreeMind as one of the alternatives. EverNote is a free utility (has a paid version too) which impresses many people and they take it is a perfect replacement of OneNote, although it’s not open source. In web based applications Zoho Notebook is the best application as far as replacement of OneNote is concerned.

4. Sharepoint alternative : Microsoft sharepoint allows users to collaborate on MS office documents and we can achieve the same with the help of O3Spaces, which works well with OpenOffice.Org. When it comes to content management system part, then we can always use Drupal for that.

Are we left we anything else ? If we are then could you please mention those applications and we’ll find out the perfect alternatives for you or better yet, if you already know the alternatives. Do share it with the community.