Geekfoolery

A brand new spankin’ new copy of Microsoft Office 2007, shrink-wrapped and everything, will cost you at a minimum, $129.00 for the Home/Student edition. It includes Word, Excel, Powerpoint and OneNote, whatever that is. The more powerful Full Version, with Publisher, Access, Outlook and all that crap runs $437.99, though don’t forget, free shipping.

In the workplace, it’s one thing, because your employer is not actually spending real money to buy this, your copy of Word and Excel are paid for out something called a “budget” and it’s basically no skin off your nose. But for those of who do not recoil in horror when we come home at the sight of our computers and perhaps we actually want to sit down and write something or make a spreadsheet or something, well, $120 bucks is real money. And that’s just for Office. It’s like these software publishers want us to actually buy software! I mean, c’mon! It’s just ones and zeros, guys.

Fortunately, most of us don’t need the full-blown version of Word or Excel with more features and functions than HAL 9000. I just want to write the occasional letter or keep track of my bills. I am not about to make a Powerpoint to convince the kids to clean their rooms. For people with fairly basic needs, we are entering an era of free online software.

The field of online office suites, as well as other online programs, is constantly evolving, and getting better every time I look at it. For basic productivity, any one of these sites will do just fine:
Google Docs and Spreadsheets: This is the one I use the most. At the time I decided to commit to a platform, Google Spreadsheets had just acquired Writely, an online word processor, and shortly there after I had both word processing and spreadsheets. The pages are quick loading and stable under Firefox, and there have been no issues going back and forth between a PC and Mac with the files. I also use GMail, so it’s also nice to have good integration with my mail program.

Zoho: I started out with Zoho Writer before Google Docs got off the ground. Now Zoho has added spreadsheets, presentations, a Wiki, a database, and a Virtual office module, even a CRM tool. Most of the tools are free for individual and even limited small business use. Zoho is also quick loading, and appears to have a slightly richer feature set than Google Docs and Spreadsheets, and Excel users will feel more at home in the spreadsheet.

Thinkfree Office: Thinkfree has word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations, and aims for compatibility with MS Office docs. The downside for me with Thinkfree is that it needs to download a Java runtime environment. It’s supposed to need to do this only once, but it comes up more often than that for me. Java also seems to be a resource hog and occasionally unstable. When it’s running, though, it is almost identical to MS Office. (Note: Jonathan notes that Thinkfree does have a Quick Edit mode that does not require Java; see his comment below)
All three office suites allow you to share documents, giving you the choice to grant viewing or editing rights to other people you wish to work with. You do need to be online to use these, though there are offline modes once you’ve downloaded a document. You can export MS Office-standard files from all three, along the other common formats such as PDF.

The other advantage here is online storage of your documents. I wouldn’t keep CIA agents lists or credit card databases up on a web server, but the online storage is at least as secure as my laptop, and much less prone to crash and lose all my data. The upshot is you can go log in to any computer and access your files.

Here are some other online “software” packages:

Phixr: OK, this site isn’t going to put Photoshop out of business, but for simple, quick, basic photo editing, cropping, this is pretty handy. You can grab photos directly from Flickr, and save your output to a variety of formats. It even will run a quick Optical Character Recognition on an image file, if you want. Pretty snazzy.

Cooltext: This site lets you create buttons on logos using their online tool. A bit of a one-trick pony, perhaps, but a fine trick it is. Because let’s face it, everyone can tell when you make a poster using MS Word’s “WordArt” tool. And we’re not impressed.

Gifworks: Handy place to go if you want to make an animated GIF. They have a templated format that allows even a novice to make a god-awful annoying animated GIF for their amateur website. Or something.

One of the nicer things about online software tools is that upgrades are happening all the time. You’ll go to log in one day and notice that some new feature has been added, or that it loads faster, or looks prettier. Unlike software you install on your machine, online apps can be updated centrally.

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