5 Open Source Alternatives to Microsoft Office
For the past several years, Microsoft Office has remained the leader in office productivity software offering integrated applications for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, database management, email handling, and above all, desktop publishing. An office suite is a mandatory part of any operating system’s ecosystem. It is difficult to imagine a desktop operating system without office software. Windows has the Microsoft Office suite, which now dominates even the Mac market with Office for Mac. But for the Linux operating system, there are many choices available.
Some of the open-source or free alternatives are even better than Microsoft Office when it comes to minimizing costs and their capability to work with office files. However, all office suites are not the same and each has some limitations or the other. One also needs to bear in mind that the formatting of one file type can be saved in different ways for different programs. This can cause problems when sharing files with those using different software. Therefore, it’s important to ensure that the formatting is retained accurately.
- OpenOffice
On July 19, 2000, at OSCON, Sun Microsystems announced it would make the source code of StarOffice available for download. The intention was to build an open-source development community around the software and provide a free and open alternative to Microsoft Office. The new project was known as OpenOffice.org and the code was released as open-source on October 13, 2000. OpenOffice.org became the standard office suite on Linux and spawned many derivative versions. It quickly became a competitor to Microsoft Office, achieving 14 percent penetration in the large enterprise market by 2004. The development of OpenOffice.org was sponsored primarily by Sun Microsystems, which used the code as the basis for subsequent versions of StarOffice.
Website: www.openoffice.org
- LibreOffice
On September 28, 2010, it was announced that The Document Foundation would be the host of LibreOffice, a new derivative of OpenOffice.org. The Foundation’s initial announcement echoed users’ concerns that Oracle would either discontinue OpenOffice.org or place restrictions on its use as an open-source project, as it had done with Sun’s OpenSolaris. The alternative name LibreOffice was picked after researching trademark databases and social media, as well as after checking to see if it could be used for URLs in other countries too.
Earlier, OpenOffice.org had been distributed as BrOffice.org in Brazil by the BrOffice Centre of Excellence for Free Software because of a trademark issue. LibreOffice 3.3 beta used the build infrastructure and the OpenOffice.org 3.3 beta code from Oracle, then adding selected patches from Go-oo. Later, Go-oo was discontinued in favor of LibreOffice.
Website: www.libreoffice.org
- NeoOffice – An office suite for Mac
NeoOffice was the first OpenOffice.org fork to offer a native Mac OS X experience, with easier installation, better integration into the Mac OS X interface, and use of Mac OS X’s fonts and printing services without additional configuration and integration with the Mac OS X clipboard and drag-and-drop functions.
NeoOffice began as a project to investigate methods of creating a native port of OpenOffice.org to Mac OS X. The project, now called NeoOffice, was originally dubbed NeoOffice/J, reflecting its use of Mac OS X’s Java integration to enable a native application. A related project was NeoOffice/C, which was a simultaneous effort to develop a version using Apple’s Cocoa APIs. But NeoOffice/C proved very difficult to implement and was highly unstable, so the project was set aside in favor of the more promising NeoOffice/J.
Website: www.neooffice.org
- OnlyOffice
In 2009, a group of software developers, headed by Lev Bannov, launched a project called TeamLab, a platform for internal team collaboration. In March 2012, TeamLab introduced the first HTML5 based document editors at CeBit. In July 2014, Teamlab Office was officially rebranded to OnlyOffice and the source code for the product was published on Sourceforge and GitHub. In February 2017, the app for integration with ownCloud/Nextcloud was launched. In February 2018, OnlyOffice desktop editors became available as a snap package. In January 2019, OnlyOffice announced the release of end-to-end encryption functionality.
OnlyOffice is an open-source office suite developed by Ascensio System SIA. It is delivered either as a SaaS solution or as an installation for deployment on a private network. Access to the system is through a private online portal. OnlyOffice is divided into several modules: Documents, CRM, Projects, Mail, Community, Calendar, and Talk.
Website: www.onlyoffice.com
- KOffice
In 1997, Reginald Stadlbauer first developed KPresenter, and this was followed by KWord, in 1998. The first official release of the KOffice suite was on October 23, 2000, when it was launched as part of the K Desktop Environment 2.0. KOffice underwent a major transition as part of the release of KDE Software Compilation 4 (SC4). The KOffice team prepared a major new release – KOffice 2.0 – which used the new KDE Platform 4 libraries. Although version 2.0 was released in 2009, this was labeled a ‘platform release’.
In May 2010, version 2.2.0 was released, with an unprecedented number of new features and bug fixes. In mid-2010, the KOffice community split into two separate communities, KOffice and Calligra. KOffice forked the KSpread spreadsheet utility to KCells, the KPresenter presentation tool to KOffice Showcase, and the Karbon14 drawing tool to KOffice Artwork. KOffice 2.3 was released on December 31, 2010. Beginning with KOffice 2.4, the developers aimed to release new KOffice versions every six months in sync with SC4 releases.
Website: www.calligra.org