CNET this morning has put up on its website a particularly useful set of reviews of the major online and offline office suites. As readers of this blog may recall, I put a lot of stock in CNET software reviews, which are among the best available. The reviews this time are equally good at getting to the essentials most significant to users. It’s one of the best overviews available.
Particularly useful is the side-by-side comparison chart for the nine suites under review, including CNET’s unabashed ratings, pricing information and suite components. Each product receives its own review, including a summary of pro’s, con’s, bottomline recommendation, a full detailed review and even comparative prices at leading stores, which can vary widely.
CNET gives top rating to Microsoft Office 2007, though acknowledging that it is by far the most expensive alternative. It also prefers Star Office 8, which costs $79.95, over the similar Open Office 2, which is free. Online suites ThinkFree and Google Doc’s and Spreadsheets, which surprisingly receive higher ratings than some of their desktop competitors, get the nod over Zoho. CNET prefers Corel WordPerfect Office for long and complicated documents, though the review does not explain exactly why. Mac users appear to be well served by Applie iWorks 08. The brand-new Lotus Symphony is unrated, as it is still in beta-testing.
Writers should take note that these reviews cover an entire office suite. Stand-alone word processors are not included in this review.
Users of Microsoft Office 2007 should definitely check the review, which provides a link to a very handy plug-in that provides support for the increasingly important Open Document Format [.odf], which Redmond left out.
Sorry, comments are closed.
Comment by
Barry Sampson
1 Oct 2007
Bearing in mind that the ratings given come from reviews that are bewteen 6 and 12 months old These reviews should be taklen with a serious does of salt, especially regarding the online ofes which have all been updated since their reviews.
CNet seems to be indicating that these reveiws were updated on 27th September 07, but bearing in mind the review of Google Docs states that it doesn’t have an alternative to PowerPoint (which it has since 18th September 07), this clearly isn’t true. Also the interface and features have had a significant update since then.
I realise that readers of this blog are most likely specifically interested in word processors, but taking these reviews as an indication of the quality of any element of each suite could be a mistake.
Comment by
Tom Colvin
2 Oct 2007
Barry, your point about ratings and evaluations is very well taken. It is indeed true that some of the reviews accompanying the current CNET article are dated. The Corel WordPerfect review, as I recall, is well over a year old.
The date of rating is particularly important with the online suites, as they are updated much more frequently.
Readers of this blog will know that I try to follow developments in that arena particularly closely, and I see those applications becoming increasingly important. In fact, just 3 days ago, I added gateways to ThinkFree and Zoho into my Facebook account for evaluation — expect some report about that here sometime this month.
And thanks again, Barry, for your obsefvation. I look forward to whatever else you may wish to pass along.