DFW Computer Integration

It has come to my attention that Microsoft is increasing their Office 365 subscription from $99 a year to $129.

That is a 30% increase.

Outrageous.

It’s time to ask yourself if you really NEED this product.

There are several alternatives to MS Office 365. The only reason you can’t just switch away from Micro$oft would be if you MUST have Outlook. And there are better alternatives available for Outlook as well.

Outlook is a PIG. It was designed to work with Microsoft’s Exchange email server. It uses a relational database, which is total overkill for the typical user. Unless you work with a team and absolutely require the team interaction functions. Otherwise, Thunderbird by Mozilla is a vastly superior product. I switched away from Outlook in 2007 and have never regretted this decision. One other caveat: If you use Word or Excel macros, they will likely not work in alternative products.

Let’s look at the Office 365 alternatives.

• Open Office (by Apache)
• LibreOffice
• FreeOffice

All of these are cross-platform. Which is to say they work with Windows, Mac and Linux. There are several others, but they have reasons to avoid them and I won’t waste your time going over them.

My personal preference is Open Office. I have been using it since 2007. With minor tweaking of the file format, it will not only open Office 365 documents, it will save in a fully compatible format as well.

All three of these products include alternatives to Word, Excel and Powerpoint. They are easy to use and appear familiar to anyone who has used older versions of Office.

Microsoft Outlook Alternative

Outlook to Thunderbird takes a little planning, but should be fairly straight-forward.

Thunderbird has a built-in importer that has easy to follow instructions.

Contact us if you need help switching over to free office products.