Is Microsoft Office worth paying for?

The latest version of Microsoft’s Office suite, Office 2010, has now been released.

This time a new cut-down Starter edition is be offered by computer manufacturers and pre-installed on PCs they sell. It will be free of charge to users and will instead include advertising to make money.

It’s not the only free office program around, though. For instance Open Office offers similar tools and more recently, several free applications have appeared online, such as Google Docs and Zoho.

Both offer word processing, presentations and spreadsheets, but they do not require any software to be installed on the computer, rather they are used entirely over the internet, in a web browser.

We have already looked at ways to get Microsoft Office for less money. Here, though, we are going to look at the pros and cons of paying for the full version of Microsoft Office or making do with its Starter edition or a free alternative.

All of the programs we mention are compatible with Microsoft Office, meaning they will read and write the appropriate files.

Open Office
The big name in free office tools is Open Office, which is open-source software. This means it’s created and updated by volunteers and is not usually sold (it has been supported by the large computer firm Sun, which sold its own version under the name Star Office). You can download a free copy of Open Office here.

Early versions were not particularly easy to use and it lacked the finesse of Microsoft Office, but it is now much more impressive. While Microsoft has clearly spent a lot of money on the look and feel of Office, Open Office looks like it has been put together for nothing.

However, in terms of functions and features it’s close to Microsoft Office. There are a few differences between the current versions, though.

Firstly, Microsoft Office 2010 uses the ‘ribbon’ interface that was introduced with Office 2007. This replaces most of the menus in the program with a series of buttons arranged across the top of the screen. Open Office, however, continues to use standard menus.

Open Office also lacks a grammar checker and the Research tool but more commonly used features such as styles, font and formatting options, and spell checking, are all there. In Open Office Calc, the equivalent of Excel, advanced options such as pivot tables are available, as are most of the common functions and charts.

One important point to note is that Excel can handle much larger spreadsheets, in the millions of rows, while Open Office stops at around 65,000. This may not affect many users, but it’s not implausible to have that many items in a spreadsheet.