Can you compute for free?

Posted on 8 Oct 2008 at 12:47

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At Shopper we like to point out where you can save money, but is it possible to set up the system of your dreams without spending a penny? Tim Danton finds out.

What with soaring interest rates, plummeting house prices and a dramatic worldwide economic downturn, it seems 2008 is not the year for splashing out on the best that money can buy. Luckily, it is possible to run your computer without forking out on software. But how well do the free programs match up against their fully priced equivalents, and what do you sacrifice in the process? In this feature, we aim to find out.

We've rated the free software on a number of key criteria, including ease of use, the power of their features and how compatible they are with the relevant dominant software package.

We wanted to know how challenging it is for a user of a traditional program to switch over to the free alternative. Each application offers a lot, but we're less interested in how many features are crammed in and more with how well a program has been thought out. Compatibility is crucial, so we'll be finding out not only how easy it is to create a document in the free software but also whether your friends and colleagues will curse your tightfistedness when you try to share your freely created files.

The alternatives aren't limited to those mentioned here. There are many free word processors, photo editors, CRM programs and video editors whose virtues we could extol - but then we'd have needed the whole magazine.

Free v Microsoft Office

If there's one thing Microsoft knows how to do, it's how to make a great office suite. Word is the world's leading word processor and Excel the leading spreadsheet tool. This isn't marketing spin; they are a joy to use. However, in recent years, Office's dominance has come under threat from several free alternatives.

First came OpenOffice, the latest version of which uses the same core code as Sun's Star Office 8 (still available for £70 including VAT). OpenOffice is available on the Shopper cover DVD every month as part of the Expert Toolkit. Then came several online applications, including Google Docs (http://docs.google.com) and Zoho (www.zoho.com).

Online applications used to work only when you were online, so no internet connection meant no access to your documents. However, Google recently launched Gears, which integrates with your web browser using data stored on your PC, rather than relying on a website. When online, the browser synchronises with the online database. It works with both Google Docs and most of Zoho's applications. This means you can work without an internet connection and update the online documents the next time you connect.

Office dynamics

All the alternatives are capable of doing the main task for which they were designed, which is importing existing Microsoft Office documents, creating new ones and offering some advanced editing features. For example, it's easy to embed pictures and tables in documents.

There are limitations, though. Even in the otherwise-excellent Zoho Writer word processor, when you print you get the default header and footer that you always get when you print from a browser, with the page number at the top right, and the web address and date at the bottom. To avoid this, Zoho suggests you save the document as a PDF file and then print it. However, this is not always convenient.