Now it’s PC Magazine’s turn to weigh in on the question of alternative office suites, with a series of new reviews rolling out on its website over the past month or so. The reviews are typically fairly thorough; each includes a slideshow of screenshots.
By and large, the reviewer gives decent grades to the major online contenders when processing basic documents, but he expresses irritation over the sluggish online handling of big documents and spreadsheets. He also shares information about important emerging efforts to provide some desktop linkages to online documents. He also has positive remarks about the major free contender to Microsoft Office 2003.
Zoho Office Suite’s individual applications come off well in the magazine’s review. The reviewer complains a bit about the differing on-screen layout arrangements for similar functions among the word processor, spreadsheet and presentation applications. Writers working exclusively with Writer, however, will not even notice. The reviewer, on the other hand, is pleased with the capability of interoperability between the online Zoho Writer and the desktop Microsoft Office Word 2003.
This reviewer however prefers ThinkFree, largely because of its more advanced pairing of online and offline capability. Some of these features are in beta version, but will be available in the near future. There’s even a Premium, but fee-based version just around the corner.
The magazine’s major review of Open Office 2.3 appeared on the web-site about a month ago. The reviewer was impressed with its stability and depth of features, even if the interface struck him as clunky.
The review of the beta-version desktop suite Lotus Symphony, available via a link in the sidebar, dates from five weeks ago, and this blog has already covered that. The review of online application Google Docs and Spreadsheets is even older, dating back to May.
If you are looking for an alternative to Microsoft Office, this series of articles will provide you with lots to think about. Just be aware that there are still other alternative word processors that were not covered in this series.
Sorry, comments are closed.