A Near-Free, Great Alternative to Microsoft Office
March 20th, 2008 (4:00pm) Samuel Dean 7 CommentsTweet This
If you and your colleagues use the Microsoft Office suite of productivity applications, you’re probably very familiar with how much the suite costs and perhaps the high cost of licensing the applications. Of course, there are completely free alternatives to the Office suite, such as the open source suite OpenOffice, but my favorite alternative falls just between costly Microsoft Office and free OpenOffice: Software 602’s PC Suite.
This suite of applications has been around for a long time, and it’s no longer free, as it was for many years. You can get it for $39.95, or a 3-user version for $79.95, or a 25-user version for $399.95. That’s far below what it costs to deploy Microsoft Office across many users. The best thing about Software 602’s PC Suite is that the applications are so similar in look and feel to applications such as Microsoft Word and Excel that Microsoft and Software 602 have actually done some wrangling over the years.
Software 602’s PC Suite consists of four applications: a word processor, spreadsheet, digital photo editor and photo organizer. The suite is designed to be extremely compatible with the Microsoft Office applications. I’ve tested this extensively, and the only success I’ve had at tripping Software 602’s suite up in the compatibility department has come when I’ve tried to import complex Excel spreadsheets with many graphics into the 602 spreadsheet. The graphics, in particular, sometimes won’t convert properly. Other than that, though, it does an uncanny job of working just like the Office applications.
The 602 PC Suite is faithful to many standard Windows conventions, so if you’ve used the Office applications a lot, you’ll feel at home. Context-sensitive menus produced by clicking the right mouse button, for example, work just like they do in Office counterparts. Likewise, Windows-standard shortcuts such as hitting Ctrl-Z to undelete also work smoothly.
Software 602’s suite was free for so many years that I got lulled into thinking it would always be free. The reason the company now charges a bit for it, though, is because it can. If you want to reduce your group’s software costs and you’re looking at the Microsoft Office applications, try Software 602’s free trial.
Do you know of good Windows alternatives to the Microsoft Office applications?
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Interesting, I’ll have to check it out. Is there any way to automate Software 602, the way Microsoft Office is so readily extended using VBA?
Abiword is a nice Word alternative. Personally, I’ve been happy using the online Zoho apps.
Myke, I’ve tried Abiword and couldn’t find anything about it I liked. My word processor of choice on my Mac is Bean, however I find myself rarely using it since the Mac will show me spelling errors by default. I rarely need to use custom forms or tables or advanced layouts and can say it has probably been 4 months or more since I’ve even launched it.
Nice, I will look into this one. Right now I am hooked on open office as it is completely free.
I can recommend Softmaker Office, which is also priced between OOo and MS Office (80US$).
Very fast, even on my eeePC, good feature set and extremely stable.
I can recommend Softmaker Office, which is also priced between OOo and MS Office (80US$).
Very fast, even on my eeePC, good feature set and extremely stable.