Office Suites are suites of personal
productivity products for primarily creating documents, spreadsheets and
presentations. Of late, the trend has been to move away from installed,
licensed software products towards online products that are accessed over the
Internet and are paid via a monthly or annual subscription, with free updates
during the period of subscription. In earlier days, we all started our
computers with Wordstar and Lotus 1-2-3. Office Suites have ‘graduated’ since
then, with additional features and extended capabilities which are barely used
in our day-to-day working. But we cannot do without them either. Here, we take
an overview of some major leading Office Suites for productivity at the
workplace.
MICROSOFT OFFICE
Microsoft Office is the king of Office
Suites comprising a complete collection of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneDrive,
Outlook, OneNote, Skype and Calendar. If you are comfortable and used to the
Microsoft eco-system (who isn’t?) this is the best choice for you. Microsoft
365 Family (originally Office 365) and the allied range is the latest online
version of the Suite, is quite affordable, auto-upgradable and allows you to
backup and store your documents online with a whopping online storage of up to
1 TB per user, for multiple devices. You can work online and offline and the
.docx, .xlsx and .pptx formats are the gold standard for office suites. The
entire suite encompasses a plethora of features and you can utilise them as you
grow your proficiency in handling them. They also have Android and iOS versions
which work seamlessly on your mobile phones.
G-SUITE / GOOGLE DOCS
G-Suite is the office suite from another
online giant – Google. It offers Gmail, Docs (including docs, sheets,
presentations, forms, drawings), Drive and Calendar for business – all that you
need to do your best work, together in one package that works seamlessly from
your computer, phone or tablet. The pricing per user is very attractive in
India. You can use either the online or the offline mode as per your convenience.
Of course, it has Android and iOS versions also, which makes it easy to use the
suite from any device you own.
Google Docs is the free version of G-Suite
with the same powerful features, but with scaled-down capabilities and reduced
storage online.
Most of the features of Microsoft Office for
day-to-day use are found in G-Suite. Of course, being a Google product, the
search function is very powerful and innovative. If you are comfortable with
the Google environment, G-Suite is the best choice for you.
LIBREOFFICE
LibreOffice is a powerful and free office
suite, a successor to OpenOffice (.org), used by millions of people around the
world. Its clean interface and feature-rich tools help you unleash your
creativity and enhance your productivity. LibreOffice includes several
applications that make it the most versatile free and open source office suite
on the market: Writer (word processing), Calc (spreadsheets), Impress
(presentations), Draw (vector graphics and flowcharts), Base (databases) and Math
(formula editing).
LibreOffice is free and gets updated
regularly. It is compatible with a wide range of document formats such as
Microsoft® Word (.doc, .docx), Excel (.xls, .xlsx), PowerPoint (.ppt, .pptx)
and Publisher. But LibreOffice goes much further with its native support for a
modern and open standard, the Open Document Format (ODF). With LibreOffice, you
have maximum control over your data and content – and you can export your work
in many different formats, including PDF.
WPS OFFICE
WPS Office is a complete, free office suite
with a PDF editor. It is available across platforms and can be used on Mac, PC,
Android, iOS, Linux and also online. It includes many useful templates (just
like Microsoft and Google offerings) which help you to start creating excellent
documents right from the word go.
The documents created have high level of
compatibility with Microsoft Office, Google Docs and Adobe PDF. The entire
package is ultra-light with an ultra-small installation and ultra-fast startup
speed. It is available off the shelf with 8 languages for PC and 46 languages
for Android. So if you have a lot of multilingual correspondence with
international clients, this would be the best option for you.
With PDF, Cloud, OCR, file repair and other
powerful tools, WPS Office is quickly becoming more and more people’s first
choice in office software.
SMARTOFFICE
SmartOffice lets you view and edit Microsoft
Office files and also PDFs on the go. It is an intuitive, easy-to-use document
editing app with a sleek design inspired by the familiar UI of a desktop Office
document. Users can view, edit, create, present and share MS Office documents
directly on or from their mobile devices. Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF are also
supported. Besides, you can print wirelessly directly from the App to a host of
printers which are WiFi-enabled.
Documents can be saved in original file
formats or quickly converted to PDFs. All editing and formatting functions are
supported. Support is available even for password-protected documents. Full
Cloud Synchronisation is available and you can open and save documents to the
Cloud with effortless ease with Box, Dropbox and Google Drive.
A must-have tool in your suite of apps for
productivity on the go.
So now you have many options, many of
them free – just choose the one best for you and go right ahead with improving
your productivity at work. Best wishes!
