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Another Office Alternative

Posted by michael on from the one-office-suite-to-bind-them-all dept.

MiTEG writes "The Washington Post has an article on a cheaper alternative to Microsoft's Office Suite, ThinkFree Office. Currently selling for $50, their product also includes a one year subscription to Cyberdrive, a 20 MB web file-storage service. While it's no StarOffice, this glowing review may help people realize that Microsoft is not the only option." 'Glowing review' probably isn't the right term to use, since the reviewer found quite a few faults.

5 of 213 comments (clear)

  1. Alternatives by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    There are a list of alternatives at fuckmicrosoft.com

  2. Re:I'm underwhelmed by jeffy124 · · Score: 3, Informative

    the reason swing is slow is because it has maintain prtability between windowing systems (GNOME vs KDE, for example) and OSs (like Windows vs Solaris). As a result, the code becomes a little bloated in getting everybody supported equally.

    AWT, the original gui package, ran ok for the runtime environment it had, but was very feature limited, as they only implemented something everybody had.

    Swing, OTOH, implementes every gui widget you can think of, and uses the Java 2D graphics package instead of the native windowing system (although that too has changed). When I said earlier that Swing was improved in 1.4, it was actually this 2D package that was improved.

    Chances are high that the ThinkFree suite was implemented for Java 1.3 since 1.4 was just released within the past month or two.

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    The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
  3. Re:File formats are more important by Evro · · Score: 4, Informative

    Pdf is ok, but again the file format itself is proprietary

    PDF is not proprietary; it is an open standard. The problem with PDF is that it is not editable, so is not very useful for sending back and forth for editing purposes.

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    rooooar
  4. Columnist replies... by robp · · Score: 3, Informative

    Thanks for the comments on my review (although I really didn't expect it to draw a mention here, as opposed to my piece on the CBDTPA a week ago).

    To answer a couple of points people have raised:

    * Spell-checking: ThinkFree Office has a spell checker, but it doesn't flag misspellings as you type them, Word-style. You have to invoke the spell-checker "by hand." (My editor was afraid my description here might not have been clear enough. Guess he was right :)

    * Importance of word count: Guilty as charged! I write for a living and I *need* this feature to do my job. Since a word count isn't exactly a difficult feature to support (as opposed to, say, revision tracking), I don't think it's out of line to expect it.

    * Other Office alternatives: I left out AbiWord because it is a) just a word processor, not a full suite, and b) it's OS X compatibility is only available if you install an X11 server, which is a lot of work to ask of a home user (the target reader for my column).

    I am planning on a review StarOffice whenever 6.0 ships, most likely as part of a comparison with OpenOffice.

    Any other questions, y'all know where to reach me...

    - R

  5. HELOOOO!!! Have any of you used this app? by swagr · · Score: 4, Informative

    Well, there are several of premature remarks here. "Java is slow", "it's not free", "it's not Office/StarOffice/KOffice", etc...

    Just to let you all know. I actually tried it.
    I used it to whip up an updated version of my resume, and saved in in rtf, doc, and html. I then proceeded to open the doc and rtf in Word, and the html in various browsers, only to find they all looked exactly as expected.

    I thought that was rather nice.

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