Free office suites look and behave a little (but only a little) differently, and many organizations just don’t want the overheads placed on their stretched helpdesk resources that rolling out LibreOffice would indubitably create. Then, there’s the dislike of the slight differences that many users manifest. The first is a lack of knowledge that there are alternatives, or where to get them from, or how to install them. Surprisingly, the answer is no - the majority of businesses don’t choose any of the free alternatives for several reasons. Offered a free alternative to the annual stipend required to run Microsoft Office 365, surely it stands to reason that most businesses are switching to iWork, OpenOffice, LibreOffice or even FreeOffice, (the latter coming in both free and paid versions)?ĬIO Dropbox gets collaborative with ‘Spaces’ feature Originally a fork of the still-extant OpenOffice, LibreOffice has legions of followers, and unlike the users of iWork, saving by default can be set to be the more common (yet arguably inferior). keynote), unreadable by the rest of the non-Mac world, without a good degree of fiddling.Īs well as Apple’s iWork suite, Mac (and Windows, and Linux) users could also use the free LibreOffice, the most commonly used free, open-source office suite of apps. The command to save docs so they can be used straight away by Windows-using colleagues is “Export…” from the File menu. xlsx, but it’s not something that happens without the user thinking about it. The Apple variants look fantastic (as you’d expect), have slicker interfaces, produce smoother, more satisfactory results, and are, generally, more Mac-y (if that’s an adjective).Īnd as far as compatibility goes, Pages et al. Mac users have had a choice for spreadsheets, presentations and word processing for several years, and have been free to download for a while now: Apple’s Pages, Numbers, and Keynote are Cupertino’s attempt at usurping Microsoft’s Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

Office gets installed onto new machines and little else besides, other than a bit of tinkering with settings and some cybersecurity measures - and that makes the company desktop.īut what if your company doesn’t feel quite so good about sending Microsoft the significantly large chunk of dollars every year for the privilege of being able to undertake a little light word processing and the occasional PowerPoint presentation creation? Roaming Free The familiar splash screen of Word is as much part of the office furniture as the swivel chair and the water cooler.

In many cases, the email app gets ignored for the baked-in copy of Outlook that ships with Office.Įven hardened users of Office 365 or apps like Word Online still feel more secure with an old-school office suite installed locally. Usually, however, the standard-issue company desktop comprises a browser, an email app, and a copy of Office.

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