Office Suites Quick Comparison

This is a quick comparison of the four most commonly used Office suites: MS Office, Apple iWorks, Open Office and Google Docs.

Office suites

Most Commonly used Office suites:

Microsoft Office
Open Office
Apple iWorks
Google Docs

In this article I would like to run a quick comparison of the above 4 office suites to help some of you readers in choosing what Office suite to use. I will use 6 criteria that in my opinion are important when identifying what document handling application to use. The table below shows a comparison of the 4 most commonly used Office applications by Price, Availability and Functionality

MS Office is the most expensive, but at the sam time it is the most commonly used Application and still by large has the most powerful functionality. Also MS Office is available for both OSX, Windows and Linux/wine based computers. MS Office has powerful database handling software such as Access and a widely used Spreadsheets application Excel.

Apple iWorks is an OSx native application and is very good for doing publishing work and creating presentations, For those who are keen on Spreadsheets and have experience of Visual Basic you will probably find that iWorks Numbers misses quite a few features. Also a big disadvantage of iWorks is that it is only available on OSX based computers.

Open Office scores the best for the price for a "physically installable" application, as it is free. Open Office is also available for all most commonly used platforms including Linux family of Operating Systems. The interface and functionality is quite advanced and replicates most of tools that are offered by MS Office. Open Office is a great tool for those who wants a powerful Office Application for home or business use without paying a penny.

Google Documents in my opinion is the future. It is currently a very useful application for fast and simple on the GO document handling. It absolutely free and very fast to install (you only need to register with Google). It is available on any platform that has access to the web and will not take any space on your computer (as it is webbased). A lot of development work is done for this Office Suite and it will be the core part of Google Chrome OS, so we need to pay a close look on this App.

So now it is for you to choose by large MS Office wins on all the categories except for the price it is for to choose what is your value for money...