Getting Office Software for Windows Vista

Over the last couple of months, I've been looking at ways to spruce up Windows Vista, either by getting some of the bits Microsoft leaves out of its cheaper versions or by borrowing bits and ideas from other sources such as Apple's Mac OS.

But typically, a new Vista PC or notebook ends up just being that - a computer with Windows Vista and few extras. If you're 'lucky', you may get a 60-day trial version of Microsoft Office, which is great - for 60 days.

Whoever said most people will never need to buy software again was right. The average home office will need at least four pieces of software - a Web browser, an email client, a word processor and a spreadsheet program. Obviously, you'll have your own needs, but these four are pretty much must-haves.

While Microsoft supplies the first two in Internet Explorer and Windows Mail, they're by no means the only free options.

Office Software

We all know Microsoft Office and know how expensive it is. If you have a previous version you used on an old PC, you can install it on your new Vista PC, if you're not using the older PC any more.

If that's a problem, there are plenty of alternatives out there to choose from.

One common option is OpenOffice.org. It's a complete office suite that does spreadsheets, word processing and the like and it's free to download. However, I'm going to go out on a limb and say I don't like it - it's way too big now and it's a bit slow. You can download it from the website, but at 142M, it's not the sort of thing you can do on dialup.

If you only need spreadsheet and word processing, there are plenty of smaller options. Two I prefer actually come from the open source world and now work on Windows. The word processing application is called Abiword and the spreadsheet tool is called Gnumeric.

Word Processing: Abiword

Abiword is a great little word processor that's just 5.7M to download, but the real bonus is that it opens Microsoft Word documents. So, if you have Word .doc files from your old computer, you can open them up, edit and save them using Abiword. Best of all, it's free and easy to use.

While it doesn't do absolutely everything that Word does, it comes pretty close. And if the new ribbon command bar of Office 2007 doesn't do it for you (it doesn't for me), Abiword is more like Word 2003 than Word 2007 is now.

Spreadsheet: Gnumeric

Gnumeric is similar to Abiword in that not only is it free and relatively small (it's a 14.2M download), but it can open up and save to Microsoft Excel .xls spreadsheets you'd like to keep using. Gnumeric is one of the best standalone (it doesn't rely on anything else) spreadsheet apps available. Now, it will have problems with Excel spreadsheets that use Excel's entire vast array of features, but for most general spreadsheets, it shouldn't have any trouble.

In many respects, Gnumeric is laid out like Excel, so many of its functions do the same thing in Gnumeric (this is certainly the case for formatting columns/rows/cells).

You can download Gnumeric free from its website.

Email: Thunderbird 2

Thunderbird 2 is a free open-source email application that's similar to Windows Mail, but it's more open and allows you to modify it with lots of extension tools. However, the one problem for Vista users is that Thunderbird 2 doesn't understand Windows Mail files. This means that importing directly isn't possible, but there is an import/export extension for Thunderbird 2 that will import Windows Mail email, address box etc, into Thunderbird 2. Windows Mail has come on quite a bit from Microsoft's Outlook Express, but if you don't like it, there are free alternatives you can try.

Web Browser: Firefox 3

If you're still using Internet Explorer, try giving Firefox 3 a go. It's definitely easier to use and more like the Web browsers of old than the new ribbon-style minimalist look of Internet Explorer 7. There are plenty of plug-ins (extra add-on tools that make Firefox 3 do even more) including Adobe Flash (a must-have for YouTube videos). You can grab Firefox 3 for Windows Vista from the Firefox Web site and you can grab the Adobe Flash plug-in for Firefox 3 from Adobe's Web site.

Resources:
http://www.openoffice.org/
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/personal.html