Microsoft Office substitutes

[12/10/14 frwr-news] Yeah, I guess it's free because it's now called Softmaker FreeOffice.

And I guess I never wrote it here, but OpenOffice has branched out to become LibreOffice.  What's the difference?

[3/29/12] Apparently Softmaker Office is now free?
SoftMaker Office is a complete and full-featured office that comes with a word processor, a spreadsheet, and a presentation-graphics program. This is a fully-functional, non-crippled, not time-limited version...totally free of charge, without any obligations.

Works on Windows 7, Vista, Windows XP, and Windows 2000.

The complete office suite for Windows and Linux as a free download.
Free registration: http://www.softmakeroffice.com/register_en.htm

[9/29/08] Softmaker Office looks pretty good (just from the pictures). The 2008 version is pay, but the 2006 is still free [non-free version mentioned in frwr-news]

[8/21/08] Suggested web-based applications are Google Docs, Thinkfree Online, Zoho Office

[4/6/08] Here's one that I haven't tested called tiny USB office. It's under 2.5 MB, so it should fit easily on your USB drive. [via frwr-news]

[10/8/07] I took a look at Polar Office [via frwr-news]. It looks like it's old software which is now free because not that many people were buying it. Old is fine with me, but I couldn't import my Excel 97 spreadsheet, so I won't be using it.

[9/20/07] IBM is now offering Symphony for free

[7/28/06] Google Spreadsheets in beta looks like it has good potential, but it doesn't look like it'll have full Excel functionality any time soon.

[7/10/06] Multimedia Office from Plata Software sounds like something new. But it's pretty much just the packaging of Open Office with some other freeware multimedia programs. The Open Office version used is 2.0 and it looks improved from the last time I checked (though maybe a little slow). [from frwr-news, 6/30/06]

[12/22/05] SSuite Personal Office looked promising. But when I tried to open an Excel document, nothing appeared. And when I tried to open a .doc file, that option doesn't appear. [link from frwr-news]

[1/11/09] From another post from frwr_news, I tried the Advanced Edition 2.2. I tried to open my Excel files created in Office 97 and I got an "unable to open file" message. Maybe it works fine for newer Excel files (?), but I believe OpenOffice and Google Documents opens these files without error. And in fact to double-check, I just uploaded the file the errored in ssuite to google documents and it uploaded OK.

[10/24/05] The most popular one seems to be OpenOffice.

But I liked 602PC Suite better in the short time I tried it.

I wasn't overly impressed with EasyOffice though it got a good review at download.com.

Writely looks like an interesting online word processor.

gOFFICE looks like an interesting online office suite.

-- inspired from the article Microsoft Hits 30 <!- starbulletin 10/10/05 -->