Lab

Office suites

To even contemplate moving away from Microsoft Word and Excel feels like a betrayal. These are the products that have defined the standard for home and business over the past decade, with many computer users knowing nothing else. As any shareholder in Marks & Spencer will tell you, however, longevity and heritage are no guarantees of success, and in the past two or three years Microsoft's opposition have made lots of headway - and in some areas, actually beaten Microsoft Office.

The biggest worry for Microsoft is that there's so much competition, and all of it is cheaper than Office 2003. Ability Office 4, which offers far more features than the top-end edition of Microsoft Office, will happily read and write Word, Excel, Access and Photoshop files for less than £50.

The same goes for StarOffice, which is ideal for corporates thanks to its heavyweight developer - Sun - and the fact it will run on Windows, Linux and Solaris. The near-identical OpenOffice, meanwhile, is top choice for the monetarily disadvantaged, the morally aware and anyone with a community bent. It's also very good, and runs on more platforms than any of the others mentioned here, adding the Mac to the StarOffice mix. It makes us wonder why we're not all using it.

If you're a home user, you're in an enviable position: free to choose, install and run whichever suite you prefer. The only obstacle is inertia. If you're in charge of your company's IT budget, you need to have better reasons than inertia to not assess the competition. Instead of paying approximately £100 per year, per user for Office, you could pay absolutely nothing and just load and support OpenOffice yourself instead - although we recommend companies use the customer-supported Sun StarOffice.

You wouldn't be alone in making the switch either. Many large users have seen the merit in opting for the cheaper suite. This is particularly true of government departments, where we're seeing small pockets switch to a combination of StarOffice and Linux.

When Microsoft introduced Software Assurance, Central Scotland Police decided it was time to make the switch. While sticking with Windows, it migrated 1,000 of its users from Microsoft Office to StarOffice, and in the process made a saving of at least £245,000. And even better, as it has bought its licences outright it no longer has to make a payment to Microsoft every three years. By staying with Sun the savings will continue.

This would have been a false economy if StarOffice hadn't met the organisation's needs, of course, but it has been welcomed with open arms. Many of its users didn't previously have access to an integrated suite of office applications, and those that did have found the equation editor, and online documentation features, such as indexes and tables of contents, to be superior to the equivalents in Microsoft Office.

Schools, libraries and other educational establishments are benefiting from Sun's benevolence, too. For the cost of the CD alone, they're eligible for free site licences to run StarOffice 7 across all of their desktops. It may not be long before it's becoming better known than Microsoft Office - at least for the next generation of computer users. That makes it highly possible that Microsoft's expensive chunk of market share will be eroded over time.

Now, then, is the ideal time to take a serious look at the competition. With this in mind, we've gathered together the top seven integrated suites on the market today, ranging from the pricey Microsoft Office and Corel WordPerfect, to the affordable Ability and the hippy OpenOffice.

Each can read and write Word and Excel files - to a greater or lesser degree - and each is fighting to define its own space within this highly competitive market. With more options than ever before, there's never been a better time to make the switch.

We're not arguing that everyone should abandon Microsoft though. Office 2003 is a superb product in many ways, and if you'll take advantage of features such as Auto Summarize for Word and integration with SharePoint Services, plus the unmatched Outlook 2003, then the cost is worth it. And, naturally, there are no compatibility issues with Microsoft Office files, to which all the other suites suffer to some extent. For individuals who only need Microsoft Word, there's also a compelling argument for buying the excellent Works Suite 2005, which includes Word 2003, for £93.

But for thousands of companies and individuals alike, products such as OpenOffice offer all the power and panache they need, yet cost absolutely nothing. To give you the confidence to make the move, we also tackle the thorny problem of compatibility - how well each suite handles Microsoft Office files - and the results make interesting reading.