http://www.flickr.com/photos/dyanna/ / CC BY-ND 2.0

If you have spent any time in corporate America you are likely well acquainted with the ubiquitous Microsoft Office Suite of products (Word, Excel, Powerpoint) and their close companion Visio.  How dependent on them have you become and what happens when you want (or need) to use one of the free competitors?

When I started my own small business last year I bought a new laptop that did not include Microsoft Office.  Though I had used the tools almost extensively for most of my professional career I decided, since my new PC didn’t come with Office, to try and use the free alternatives.  After all, many of my clients are in the same situation; what would I recommend to them?

Before we start, a few disclaimers.  This not a complete, formal or even impartial review. After many many years (I was 12 when I started) of using MS Office I have a lot of unlearning to do.  All those years of using MS Office has set expectations that may or may not be reasonable.

First,  I started using Google Docs (Document and Spreadsheet).  These work OK for very simple things.  With Document once I get into anything beyond rudimentary formatting I quickly become frustrated.  Something like adding a table then resizing the columns takes many more clicks than I am used to.  Spreadsheet is a little better; I can most of what I am used to doing.  At first I was worried that I couldn’t do graphing or Pivot tables but it appears that there are gadgets that do those things; I haven’t used them yet.   I scoffed at Presentation and didn’t even try it when I couldn’t figure out how to do slide transitions or animations (ok, does every presentation need them?  No, unless you are 9 years old.  As my son is.   Enough said.).   I am also concerned that you can’t embed fragments of Documents or Spreadsheets.

Next I tried Openoffice and at first glance I was pleasantly surprised with Calc; for me it was easy to use because it was so much like Excel.   Only little things were annoying (for example, the tab under the sort function that includes the option to specify a header row is a different tab from most of the rest of the sort options).  Writer is similar; simple things like resizing the columns in a table are as intuitive as click and drag.   Where I get aggravated with OpenOffice is with reliability and performance.  I consistently get crashes and have to recover documents.   One night I was helping my son with a school project and we were using Presentation (which, by the way, support transitions and animations).  Literally, we’d type one sentence and hit ‘save’ because every other sentence we’d have a crash and have to recover the document.   The applications would also hang up a lot.

After a while I completely uninstalled Openoffice, re-downloaded it and re-installed it.   It seems to be a little better now but I have recovered at least twice already today while preparing this post.

I then tried the Zoho versions of these programs.   I don’t know if did something wrong or I was losing my mind but I would open a csv file, modify it and save it and export it; I NEVER got the resulting exported file to contain the correct modified data.  The problem might be related to the fact that Zoho really doesn’t support Safari, which I use most often.  After that I didn’t spend much time with the other Zoho applications.  I will at some point.  The media loves Zoho, I want to love Zoho too.  I just don’t yet.

The high point of my frustrations came when I wanted to do what I thought was very simple…print mailing labels based on addresses in a .csv file. OpenOffice?   I finally figured out how to do it but it crashed about 2/3 of the way thru the Mail Merge.  Google Docs?  If you can do it I couldn’t figure it out.  Zoho?   After my issues with spreadsheet I kind of gave up.   After many frustrated hours I moved to my husband’s PC, which has MS Office, and knocked out the labels in about 10 minutes.

As a techie, Visio has long been one of my favorite applications.  I consider myself the Viso queen.   Frankly, I’m afraid to try the free competitors at this point.  I imagine it would be painful.

What is the moral to this story?  First, unbeknownst to me, I have been trained (brainwashed?) into performing certain functions in a certain way; in fact I expect certain functions be available.   If you are in this camp, the learning curve costs of switching may be more expensive than the dollar cost of buying MS Office (cost of learning curve proportional to your age and the number of brain cells you’ve lost over time).  Second, despite my frustrations, I think with more modifications and enhancements these free alternatives will be viable choices for some folks; they are already viable choices for some tasks (I am using OpenOffice right now).   I plan to continue trying to use them; but may spring for Office to get me thru humps and gaps. Seems like someone could make a ton of money writing books that bridge the gap for old MS Office users like me…

What do YOU use for spreadsheets and word processing?