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Office challengers are all business

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Latest comment posted at 12:16 PM EDT 20/06/08

Microsoft's once nimble suite faces an assault from a new crop of software suites, including Symphony from IBM, Adobe's Buzzword and Corel Lightning ...Read the full article

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  1. Rick Tretiman from Waltham, United States writes: Hello. I'm CEO of Virtual Ubiquity. Thanks for writing about Buzzword. I'd like to correct a couple of observations: First, Virtual Ubiquity is the creator of Buzzword. We did not have anything to do with the Flex/Flash/AIR platform from Adobe other than to use it for the technical underpinnings of Buzzword. The platform is Adobe's work, not ours. Second, with reference to saving files locally. At this point in our development we only save Word and RTF files locally. We do not yet save Buzzword files locally. Having said that, your files are secure on our servers. We are working on an Abobe AIR version of Buzzword. When Buzzword/AIR ships you will be able to save Buzzword files locally and you'll be able to work offline as well as online.
  2. Bald Sparrow from Montreal, Canada writes: The article doesn't give enough prominence to the OpenOffice / StarOffice duo.

    These suites of programmes contain equivalents of MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Access that have 90% of the features for zero price. What;s more they are not on-line programmes but fully installed on your computer. Conversion/familiarisation time for anyone used to MS Office is about a half hour - the look and feel is almost identical.

    Not only are they free (StarOffice is sold by Sun but available from Google as free download) but they will open and save documents in either open document format or MS Office formats so file exchange is not a problem.

    Why pay >$500 when you can get the same thing for nothing?
  3. Mitchell Cardno from Calgary, Alberta, Canada writes: Office 2007 is cheap ($160 - Home & Student version - does not include outlook, but do you REALLY need it? Especially when vista comes with windows mail?) and it has leaps and bounds more features than it's competition.

    A lot of people complain that the new user interface is cumbersome, but after a week or so, you'll find that it's much easier / quicker to use. You will also find out that you can do a lot more things to your spreadsheets / word documents that you could not do previously. Office 2007 will also save to pdf and does a quicker job at it than acrobat 8 pro. The new file formats in 2007 will allow you to rename the extension to a zip file and open the zip file to extract graphics, text, macros, etc... New 2007 formats are compatible with older versions of office. Should I mention the amazing capability of using visual basic, or at least having the option to use it in your documents? These 'alternatives' are great if you're looking for a product to do home accounting on, but I will never use them in an office environment that prevents innovation to use more advanced features. If I can create a spreadsheet template with 'buttons' only once, that may take me 3 times longer to do, but for everyone after me using this template, it'll take them half the time because this 'advanced' template is mostly automated. I keep the quality and improve efficiency. For larger corporations that are looking to Microsoft to upgrade their existing office suites and are nervous about the user interface hindering efficiency, they can always sign up to Microsoft's Home Use Program (http://hup.microsoft.com) that allows employees to have a genuine copy of office on their home computer for free.

    Many people like to blast Microsoft, and while they are horrible at some things (customer service), they really excel in other areas.
  4. r r from London, Canada writes: "Mitchell Cardno says" A lot of people complain that the new user interface is cumbersome, but after a week or so, ...... Office 2007 will also save to pdf .."

    Office 2007 seems to be resource heavy and slower than 2003. A big problem for many users is the .docx file extension. I see very few advantages to 2007 and ended up reinstalling 2003. As to pdf, 2003 will do this well with a simple free pdf printer add-in, and WordPerfect has offered a save as pdf feature for years.
  5. I B from Canada writes: I find the same thing. Office 2003 IMO is the best MS Office edition.

    I did use Office 2007 for a while and I have to agree that they have messed up a perfectly good and familiar user interface. I also noticed that the new version was much slower on my machine than the old one.

    I ended up reinstalling O2003 and never regretted it.

    I B
  6. Lawrence Davis from United States writes: Great blog with lots of useful information and excellent commentary! Thanks for sharing.

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