| Which is the best Linux office suite? |
Dec. 09, 2008
OpenOffice hogs the limelight, but Linux users can actually choose between quite a few different "office" or "productivity application" suites. A newly published review compares good ol' OO.org with two commercial and two community supported alternatives, including StarOffice, Lotus Symphony, KOffice, and Abiword.
Published at InformationWeek, the review notes that StarOffice and Symphony both use the OO.org codebase, while adding support, bundling, and deployment features. For $35, the Standard version of StarOffice integrates the open source Thunderbird email client and Thunderbird's useful "Lightning" calendar extension. For $55, the Enterprise version adds support for native VBA macro and NetBeans script execution.
Symphony, meanwhile, actually unbundles several components from the weighty OO.org portfolio, narrowing down to provide only a word processor, spreadsheet, and presentations software. That focus results in a more polished product, the review suggests. However, cutting-edge OO.org features such as support for the open XML format (OOXML) used in Office 2007 may lag a bit. Another difference -- Symphony apparently breaks plug-in compatibility with OO.org, while itself offering some interesting plug-ins, such as a tool to export presentations in Adobe Flash format.
KOffice, meanwhile, breaks from the OO.org ranks with its mostly Linux-only suite (a Mac port struggles to keep up, the review suggests). The big plusses here are the breadth of included graphics tools, which include vector and raster graphics apps as well as flowcharting software. A large, high-resolution display may work best here, the reviewer suggests.
Last and certainly least in terms of footprint (15MB for a full build), the scrappy Abiword word processor makes the grade in the review for its performance alacrity and "endearing" features. Less stellar are its marks for file format support and interoperability, and it does lack advanced features, being essential a clone of "classic" Microsoft Word capabilities.
What do we use at DesktopLinux? Abiword is our system default for .doc and other document formats, because it opens small documents in a tenth the time as OO.org. Ditto for gnumeric in the spreadsheet realm. However, for any serious work not involving merely a quick look at something, we usually turn to OO.org. In fact, we would have to nominate OO.org's spreadsheet application as one of the fastest-improved open source software success stories of the last few years, particularly with regard to its charting and graphics capabilities. The last time we tried StarOffice, perhaps five years ago, it offered superior stability at the cost of being well behind OO.org on features. We've never tried Symphony, but applaud its choice of email and calendaring software, which are staple components of our own desktops!
What are you using? Let us know in the Talkback forum below.
The full InformationWeek review can be found here.
-- Henry Kingman
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