

Winner: Google Docs - This is where Google Docs is designed to shine, and it does. How easy is it to switch to a new layout and set of menus? We’ve all had years of training and practice at using Microsoft Word. Google Docs and Zoho are simply paying the price for being Web-based: They occasionally mangle heavily formatted or graphics-intensive documents, which can be a real pain when it comes to spreadsheet forms or presentations. For an online Web app, that’s very high praise.įail: Google Docs, IBM Lotus Symphony, Zoho - Symphony falls down in its inability to save to newer Office formats it can open almost anything, and convert it quite well, but you have almost no choice but to save in Open Document format or old-school Word. While that choice cost ThinkFree in other areas, it does mean that you can open almost anything in ThinkFree with minimal format drift. Pass: ThinkFree Online Beta - ThinkFree made an interesting choice to segregate document viewing and sharing from document editing.

This versatility extends to both spreadsheets and presentations, too.
#Free alternatives to microsoft word for mac pdf#
More to the point, OpenOffice can save to virtually any format it opens, and it has a top-notch native PDF output option. Winner: OpenOffice 3.1 - Thanks to some serious third-party and open-source community support, OpenOffice can handle almost any format you throw at it, including Office 2007.

Can your app open - and save to - a variety of document formats, including all the new and old Office file types? You don’t have to use MS Office, but almost everybody else will. The overall points-winner will be crowned the best free alternative to Microsoft Office that money can’t buy. A rank of Winner will confer two points, a rank of Pass will confer one point, and rank of Fail will confer zero points. In each of the following categories, the contending applications will be graded as the overall Winner, Pass, or Fail.
