Are you stuck without MicroSoft Office and don’t want to pay hundreds of dollars to get it? No problem! There are so many FREE alternatives today that are now getting close to being good enough to replace MS Office.

I bought my laptop recently and opted to not pay for all the expensive software to go along with it. Instead, I started dabbling with Google Docs. What I found was excellent but simple tools. The spreadsheets were perfect if you didn’t need graphs or the really fancy stuff. The word equivalent on Google Docs was also had limited formatting. The programs all have amazing sharing capabilities and versioning backups.

Now what if you need a bit more formatting or sophistication in your documents or don’t want to upload your .doc’s to google to view them? Google Pack has you covered! They offer a free full version of Star Office 8 (Normally 69.95) which is based in part off of the OpenOffice project.

I’ve tried it and found that runs wonderfully and I really haven’t been missing MS Office. I think Microsoft is going to have a problem in the future if the free solutions keep getting to be so close in features and function as the paid ones.

You can pick and choose only the things you want to download in the pack. If you want to give it a try, it’s a 100-200MB d/l depending on the language. Click the image below to try it!

Update: Jure mentioned in the comments that KOffice is another great open source alternative MS Office. Give this one a look as well. It is currently on Linux but will be coming to MS and Mac OS X.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 7th, 2008 at 9:10 am and is filed under Free Downloads. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.