Appearances to the contrary, OpenOffice.org and its various offshoots aren't the only choices available to you in terms of full-scale, cross-platform open source office suites. Although alternatives in this space are few, the KDE Project's KOffice is now coming on quite strong, while GNOME Office and Siag Office keep attracting fans, too.

earthweb.com: The concept of an office suite, with word processing, spreadsheet and presentation software, is one that is well understood by users, which is also why it's often difficult to improve them. Users already expect their office suites to do certain things, making the job of office suite developers often one of fit and finish.
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The Microsoft Office productivity suite has risen to become the dominant application of its type for business IT management. But there are open source office productivity suites available that may provide a suitable alternative to Office.

The free and open source office suite OpenOffice.org might be a killer app for many, but its inability to properly display documents created in the proprietary Microsoft Office formats hinders its widespread acceptance in multi-OS business environments with many legacy .doc and .xls files.

Open Office 3.1 final has been released today. The Open Source alternative to Microsoft Office can be downloaded from download portals like Betanews but not directly from the Open Office homepage as it has not been updated yet to reflect the release of the new version.

In InfoWorld's tests using complex Word and Excel documents, OpenOffice.org 3.1 failed to deliver on its promise of better Microsoft Office interoperability, severely mangling our Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel test data files. By stark contrast, SoftMaker Office showed excellent compatibility.

When you think about office suites, two names come to mind: Microsoft Office and OpenOffice. Although the vast majority of Linux users depend upon OpenOffice for their office needs, the alternatives should not be overlooked.

There are actually 5 known free and open source office suites that work best in Linux.

Quite a bit of talk has arisen today over two of Microsoft's competitors (Google and IBM) offering free office suites in an attempt to supplant Microsoft as the office king. And now that this is happened, some are wondering if Microsoft will finally face reality and offer its own Office product for free so it can compete.