Features

Office suite
OpenOffice

Price: Free

From www.openoffice.org

Alternatives to Microsoft's excellent, but pricy, Office suite seem to be sprouting up all over the place. Online alternatives such as Google Docs (www.google.com) and Zoho (www.zoho.com) are useful only while you have a connection to the internet. The nearest desktop match to Office is OpenOffice, which includes writing, drawing, spreadsheet and presentation applications. It is open source, so free to use.

OpenOffice's word processor, Writer, feels similar to Word, and does a great job of opening native Word documents, even those with tracked changes. While Writer misses out some Word features, such as grammar checking and smart tags, it has a few tricks of its own, such as the ability to save to PDF. Its Excel equivalent does a similarly good job of importing Excel workbooks, apart from those that use pivot tables. The presentation module isn't as compatible with PowerPoint, but a useful feature is the ability to export presentations to Flash format. Another handy plus is the way you can launch any of the suite's document types from inside the application you're currently using. So you can launch one application, such as Calc, from within another application, such as Writer.

OpenOffice lacks an email program, and the absence of a relational database to match Microsoft Office's Access will bother some. But for everyone else, this is a fine alternative.

Alternative: Microsoft Office 2007 Standard (£350)

Word processor
AbiWord

Price: Free

From www.abisource.com

What if you don't want or need every Office feature under the sun? When it comes to word processing, the features available in Microsoft Word are hard to beat. But it may also be the best software example of the Pareto principle: where 80 per cent of its users use only 20 per cent of its features.

AbiWord 2.4.6 has a spartan interface and is reminiscent of the simplicity of Microsoft Word a decade or so ago. It has enough features for those with simple word-processing or report-writing needs. For example, it can create headers and footers, and the program includes an equation editor. We like the ability to create mail merges from sources such as CSV spreadsheets.

AbiWord is also extensible through plug-ins, which add features such as a thesaurus to the program.

Alternative: Microsoft Word 2007 Home and Student Edition (£65)

Personal finance
Grisbi

Price: Free

From www.grisbi.org

Grisbi may have an odd name - it's French slang for money - but it's a surprisingly powerful personal finance manager. An alternative to Microsoft Money, it can cope with multiple accounts, currencies and users. It also imports and exports QIF files, so as long as your online bank supports this format, you can import your bank account transactions quickly.

You can allocate your spending to particular categories, but also split transactions to apply a particular income or expenditure to more than one spending or income category. Grisbi doesn't do double-entry accounting, which is why it isn't suited to business use. But this may be a plus for most home users, who don't need the headaches that double-entry accounting can create.

Unfortunately, Grisbi isn't all that straightforward to get up and running. It would also be nice if you could see a more graphical overview of your financial situation. However, it's a good first stop if you're trying to get your finances into some order.

Alternative: Microsoft Money (£30)

Business finance
Microsoft Office Accounting Express

Price: Free

From www.msofficeaccounting.co.uk

When it comes to pricing financial applications aimed at the business market, it almost feels like software developers think of a large number and then add a zero to the end. However, things are changing. In a market dominated by QuickBooks Pro, there's a new competitor: the free Microsoft Office Accounting Express.

Express doesn't scrimp on features; there's full support for UK VAT, for example. It is designed for inexperienced users who might be more used to trotting out their accounts in Excel. A simple setup wizard and a Quick Start window, which gives one-click access to common tasks such as invoicing, are a boon to beginners. The program also includes a Resource Centre area that houses useful business topics including training, user forums and RSS feeds of industry news.

The program's customisable home page gives an overview of your financial status, including a handy chart of cashflow, which is vital to any small business.

Given its name, it's no surprise that Accounting's big selling point is its integration with Microsoft's Office suite. For example, you can quickly export reports to Excel workbooks with column headings and formulae intact, for example. It will work happily with documents created in OpenOffice, too.

There are limitations. Accounting doesn't offer multi-currency support, and QuickBooks Pro is a better option if you need features such as stock control or payroll. Even so, it's hard to think of a better free application for businesses.

Alternative: QuickBooks Pro (£299)

PDF authoring program
Nitro PDF

Price: $84 (around £42)

From www.nitropdf.com

As PDFs become an office standard, the ability to edit and repurpose them has become a necessity. While the free Adobe Acrobat Reader can open PDFs and add comments, serious editing needs the expensive Acrobat Professional. Unless, that is, you plump for the cut-price alternative: Nitro PDF.

Nitro PDF is a match for its more expensive rival. It lets you create PDFs from scratch and, like Acrobat, it installs itself as an add-in to Word and Excel, allowing you to create PDFs directly from those applications. Nitro PDF also installs a system-level printer driver so you can create PDFs from any application.

Its editing abilities are excellent. For instance, you can copy and paste directly into an open PDF. You can also insert headers, footers, watermarks, numbering and over multiple pages. The program is a good option for filling in and creating PDF forms.

Anyone opening a Nitro PDF-created document won't be aware that it was created by a program other than Adobe Acrobat. The files you create in Nitro can be opened in Reader and Acrobat and are virtually indistinguishable from Acrobat-created documents.

Its drawback is that there isn't yet the same range of plug-ins that are available for Acrobat. But unless you rely on these, this is a cut-price way into PDF editing.

Alternative: Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional (£443)