Which office suite is the ideal alternative to MSOffice?

Question

Let's say I want to drop MSOffice permanently and switch to a free alternative, not having the need of opening the documents on other PC's except my own (I can also carry a portable version on a pendrive and edit the docs anywhere).

I know 3 free office suites - LibreOffice, Abiword and Calligra. Which one of these is the most complete and provides the best features to be a viable alternative to MSOffice, without compromising the quality of the work I can produce on Office apps?

Notice that I'm not focusing the question on compatibility between MSOffice and other suites but instead I am comparing their quality, taking in comparison MSOffice.

Answer 1

I think nothing beats libroffice for linux desktop office suite. Calligra is in development AFAIK and may bend well with KDE. Abiword is just a simple word processor. It may not replace even MS-Word for some users. But I like abiword and something like abicollab makes it portable as well.

If you want something portable, I would throw google-docs, zoho into the mix as well.

Answer 2

Libre is the most featurefull and compatible (with Microsoft Office) but there are things Office can do, that Libre will not: For example embedding fonts in documents (feature protected by patent), and a lot of bespoke applications being implemented in VBA in Excel or Access --- for example I wrote an adventure game in Excel, and I can't do this in Libre Office. (Edit: At one time, people were commonly using Excel with VBA as a 'cheap' alternative to developing a custom app in Visual Basic. Cheap in that most of the finance guys could 'program' it themselves, without having to call in a coder.)

(Edit: I say this not to put you off, but to determine exacly what/why you use an office suite for --- is it just the golf club newsletter or do you have a custom Excel app that handles your membership, accounts and league rankings? -- Libre can do that, but you will have to rewrite it and redo the GUI).

That aside, that's way beyond most people's expectations of Office software and I guess if you did that , you'd be asking about it specifically.

I personally have switched to Google's cloud office. No worries about backup and synchronisation, and it works well enough to bash out some quite good documents. Plus there are a lot of plugins: there's good plugins for google docs powerpoint that are superior in some ways to Powerpoint.

Answer 3

There is one i have used which has provided to be great, it is not well known its called Kingsoft office. It was really helpful during my dissertation, using a lot of different articles with microsoft its always hard as you have to switch form window to window, but with kingsoft i was able to switch from tab to tab and re-arrange them in order of priority. That was very helpful and less confusing as i was writting a law disso and had many various different articles and journals open at once saved me from confusion and forgetting which article contained what. www.kingsoftstore.com and the great thing was that its interface is very similar to MS and its compatible with all MS files, its one of the ones that definitely should be considered.