The Verdict
Office suites
This month’s Roundup has shown that all of the suites on test are extremely usable, but we’re naming that old workhorse LibreOffice as the best of the bunch. It’s highly competent in most areas, even if the user interface looks a bit old-fashioned in places. Not enough people know that you can select the ribbon interface if you want it, and frankly, plenty of people prefer the old toolbar-based approach anyway. However, overall, it’s clean and clear looking and also highly responsive, even on slower hardware. Unfortunately, it’s rather lacking in collaboration features and cloud integration, this is understandable in terms of its desire for people and companies to utilise third-part cloud-offerings such as Collabera Online www.collaboraoffice.com to power cloud-based options.
LibreOffice and Calligra both worked well on our old laptop, potentially making it into a useful office machine for light tasks such as writing letters and entering data into a spreadsheet.
OnlyOffice takes second place. It’s open source and has excellent core applications. The cloud hosting facilities are intriguing, particularly as you can host it yourself, thanks to it being open source. One snag with the self-hosting approach is that it requires a fair bit of technical skill to get that set up and working. That said, the company itself offers paid hosting options and they’re reasonably priced if you’d rather let someone else do the work for you.
WPS Office and FreeOffice also completed all basic tasks as expected, and they both have a pleasing interface. WPS Office
also offers a premium version with cloud storage, extra templates and unlocked versions of the mobile versions for a yearly subscription. The ‘full fat’ version of FreeOffice is called Softmaker Office and offers extra facilities such as a thesaurus in the word processor. Everyone likes free software, but in our opinion the premium versions of both of those suites look pretty reasonable in terms of pricing.
Bringing up the rear is Calligra. It is a competent office suite, but frankly a lot of it looks, if not unfinished, then somewhat unpolished. If anything, the extra applications seemed stronger than the core applications.