Open Source Office Applications for 2011

Published on February 14, 2011 by Mr nCoded · No Comments

As we know there are many organisations that only use Microsoft products for one reason or another, however if the organisation you run or work for is not one of these then take a look below to see the current range of free or rather open source alternatives.

We feature both Office suites that run on the Microsoft operating systems, as well as those that are fully online or Cloud versions. The main difference between these is that the former you will need to install (after downloading) with the later (online or cloud) being setup already pretty much ready for you to use.

All the office suites we feature here are free (or rather open source which equates to the same thing for the end user) and intend to stay that way for the foreseeable future.

It would seem strange that organisations spend extensive monies for multiple office suite licenses when yet there are many open source alternatives which offer the same, if not more functionality for free. If you add to this the fact that most can read and write to popular formats including .doc and .pdf the appeal becomes even more apparent.

A good example are the county libraries here in the UK; e.g. Cambridge city library which currently has over 30 computers available for use, all of which have MS office installed on them. Obviously (we would hope that the library buys these as bulk packs) however for the sake of argument let us imagine that each has been bought separate (something which some organisations do).

30 x £400 = £12,000

So as you can see, by going the open source route an organisation which has around 30 desktops each with MS office installed could save around £12K per upgrade!! Now if we add to this for example the fact that the UK has over 100 libraries, you can see that actually the saving could be around 1.2 Million per upgrade.