Its almost a dirty word, most people secretly want something better, but are stuck with windows applications due to policy at the work place or ignorance of anything else. What am I talking about? Microsoft Office.  Boy is that one entrenched, Microsoft makes quite a lot of money on their versions of office. They would rather you pirate windows than office.  

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So, what are our alternatives?

OpenOffice  This is a great suite , with the exception of email it contains all you need to replace office, some would say its even better (and faster) than office. It will handle word files, spread sheets , presentations. One of the best features? It can print to PDF natively ( get with the program Microsoft) 

It can be used on Windows, OSX and Linux Download

Iwork – This one is for OSX only, but wow. For a company that does not rely on office suites , they sure did a great job. The pages application (word) has a real wysiwyg interface. It acts as a real editor. The charting in numbers (excel) has all the OSX shiny parts. And I’ve heard that the presentation software is much better than powerpoint. What is one of the best features? You can get a family 3 license pack for $100. That is hard to compete with.

But enough of word processors and number crunchers, let’s get to the life blood of the corporate world, email. When it comes to replacing Outlook there are quite a few programs out there. 

Eudora  This is an old one , it has been around for a long time. It’s not bad , but i have not used it in quite some time.  What is interesting is that it actually has a server portion as well ( that is beyond the scope of this article) The clients have virus protection and spam protection built in, as well as anti-phishing support.

It will run in Windows or OSX Download

Thunderbird – By the same guys who brought you Firefox (Mozilla foundation). I love this email client, its light weight and fast, also there are plug-ins that will let you use a calendaring and not taking features that are present in outlook. Plugins are a huge benefit and very powerful , as they can make your email client do just about anything.

It will run on Windows,OSX, and Linux. Download

Evolution (also called Ximian evolution)  This is a great email client, It has pretty much all the features that outlook has, and is free. There are plugins that will let you connect directly to exchange servers (mapi plugins) , this client includes Contacts, Calendars, Memos, and Tasks. I have used this program all I love it, It really is Outlook without the bloat.

This program will run on Windows, OSX , and Linux 

Thats all for now, this is not intended to be bashing Microsoft, they make a lot of really great software. Competition is good for the industry, and I personally think that the office suite has become to bloated. So try your hand at these alternatives.