OpenOffice is Better Than MS Office

The open source world has largely increased. Through software, and potentially hardware (think of OUYA), it is slowly growing up from the young, child of the day, to the powerhouse that most of us, including me, love today.

Although I have little experience with open source, ever since I’ve used it (about 2 years ago), I fell in love with it. Sure, I wasn’t a programmer back then, but the fact that I can tamper, hack and play around with the source code, I knew two things: it will be heavily supported and it will probably have little to no bugs (I could be wrong though).

Let’s talk capabilities…

MS Office – What does it offer?

Currently, there are many distributions of MS Office. There’s MS Office 365, which gives the consumer a full year of subscription to use the whole office suite – MS Word, MS PowerPoint, MS Excel, MS OneNote, MS Publisher, MS Access and MS Outlook. It also offers full access to MS SkyDrive, Microsoft’s attempt at online storage that is accessible anywhere. This SkyDrive has 20 GB of storage. All of this, for $99 every year.

Then there is their typical packages. All of these are at full, meaning you will not need to pay a fee every year. The Home and Student package (Word, Excel and PowerPoint) for your everyday use at only $139. There’s also the Home and Business (Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook) at $249. Finally, there’s Office Professional (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Publisher and Access) at $519.

Of course, if there are updates with the software, Microsoft will provide it for you. MS Office is pretty stable and if bugs are present, they are rarely found by the consumer.

OpenOffice (Apache) – What does it offer?

OpenOffice offers a word processor, a spreadsheet, a presentation maker, fully capable drawing software (think about Publisher), a database management software and formula software. Although it may not offer SkyDrive or an email program, there are always alternatives. What’s the price, you ask? Well, because it is an open source program, the price is approximately $0. Not too much, but I think it’s worth it.

Conclusion

I think we should all have the freedom of using office suite programs. They help with productivity and it just works. Simple as that. One thing that I like from Microsoft, is MS PowerPoint. It’s probably because I’ve used it for such a long time, that I think there would be no alternative better than it. If you do have time to learn all of the software (I only use Writer, Spreadsheet and Drawer), then use all of them. They will always have some kind of upper hand compared to MS Office.

Keep Chewing!