Office suites were the first real computer applications that moved computers from the lab to the desk, and over the last 20 years office suites have evolved from simple spreadsheets to full blown productivity powerhouses. We're looking at five office suites that'll help get work done, and help do it without spending more than you'll need.

Online Office Suites

Online office suites have a few advantages over their tethered desktop counterparts. For one, most online office suites are currently free, though that's not to say they'll necessarily stay that way forever. Secondly, online office suites store your documents on a remote server, providing a nice offsite backup in case of a local disk crash and accessibility from any computer that has an internet connection. The big disadvantage is robustness. While all online office suites can effectively do the basic job, they lack many of the advanced templates and other bells and whistles of their offline competitors.

We'd tend to recommend most of the online suites to the same audience: Small businesses and college students. Rather than plunk down the change it'll take to pick up a copy of Microsoft Office, small businesses and college students will likely find the basic functions adequate, and can ignore complex expensive software for now. All of the online software suites we're talking about allow for documents to be downloaded as standard Word documents, so once users are ready to step up to another program, they'll be able to keep all of their documents with them.

Zoho

One of the most interesting office suites we've seen in a while is Zoho. The web based office suite has all the standard office applications Microsoft has trained users to expect, including a word processing application (Writer), a spreadsheet application (Sheet), a presentation application (Show), and a built in mail / contacts application that is akin to GMail meets MS Outlook.

Being the underdog fighting Google, Microsoft, Apple and the entire open-source community, Zoho has a big task to differentiate itself. In practice, Zoho's extremely speedy interface is one of the ways that the suite is better than even some desktop applications. Switching from application to application is extremely quick and simple, and the suite does a good job of keeping compatibility with other offline applications by allowing document exports in standard Microsoft Office formats.

One of our least favorite parts of using almost any online application is the often laborious sign up process. Luckily, Zoho has done away with the need for yet another account (though it offers them if you so desire). Instead of requiring users to add another username and password to their increasingly growing list, Zoho offers compatibility with Google's single sign-on, as well as Yahoo!'s YID program.

The real downside to Zoho are the lack of advanced features such as mail merge and printing envelopes. Zoho's basic functionality is on par or better than most other office suites,; however, users looking to do more than type, calculate spreadsheet cells or create basic presentations might feel like Zoho is a bit anemic. Even still, the service is free so we'd definitely recommend users give Zoho a look.

Google Docs

One of the first real contenders in the online office suite space was Google Docs. Google created the office suite by acquring a few different companies and putting their online applications together. The result is one of the most frequently used online office suites around.

Google Docs' biggest advantage is its simplicity. Users of GMail and other Google applications can simply log in and create documents without any other hurdles, and then share the results with any other Google user. Google Docs has become a de-facto standard for collaboration in many small businesses simply because of the simplicity and robustness of the collaboration features.

Collaboration features aside, Google Docs is very similar to Zoho, though with fewer applications. Google Docs has a presentation engine, however like its "Beta" moniker implies, the software doesn't feel finished. We'd definitely recommend Google Docs to someone who's occasionally creating documents that need to be collaboratively edited; however, users looking for a full featured office suite might want to give Zoho a look over Google Docs.

Desktop Applications

Online applications are swell, but these desktop applications are fully featured office powerhouses with bells and whistles that online applications haven't yet matched. Advanced office users who feel restricted by Zoho or Google Docs should definitely ditch the cloud and stick to the desktop.

OpenOffice.org

 

The first office suite to take a look at is OpenOffice.org. Most try the software because of the price (free), but some stick around as they find a fully featured way to author standard office documents. OpenOffice includes most of the basic functions found in any other office suite, including word processing, spreadsheets and presentations, but OpenOffice also includes some bonus apps like a limited drawing drawing application and a database app.

While the software has a large feature set, OpenOffice's biggest downside is its speed. The software is Java based, making it compatible across all major platforms, including Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, however Java has a tendancy to keep software performance on the sluggish side. When launching the software, especially when compared to Microsoft Office or Apple iWork, the initial launch seemed extremely slow and opening up individual applications didn't see much speed improvement either.

We'd recommend users give OpenOffice a shot to see if it fills the gaps that were missing in Zoho or Google Docs. I've used the software in previous jobs where my employer was too cheap to purchase real "office software," and I only felt handicapped by my knowledge of the software. OpenOffice is definitely worth a look, especially if you're looking for software on the cheap.

Apple iWork

One of the relatively new entrants into the office suite arena is Apple. Its iWork line of productivity applications takes a trademark Apple approach to the office. Rather than rely on standards that Microsoft established in the mid-90s, iWork tries to think differently about the notion of office software. Rather than a litany of toolbars, iWork takes a more minimalist approach without losing the utility of other desktop office apps.

iWork has three simple applications including Pages, a word processor, Numbers, a spreadsheet app, and Keynote, for presentations. Each application is extremely polished and comes with enough templates to have a starting point for most projects. One thing I noticed about Pages in particular was the software wasn't a simple word processor, but instead contains many templates to create complex and well done visual documents without as much effort as a full fledged desktop publishing application. All three applications produce documents and presentations that have an extremely finished feel without much effort on the part of the user.

iWork's biggest downside is the lack of serious office application support. Without even a rudamentary database application, users with complex office needs will still need to opt for a secondary software application. iWork instead seems best suited to home users who are light to medium business users, while more advanced workplaces will still need to opt for MS Office. Also, iWork is a Mac exclusive product, making it of course not an option for Windows users.

Microsoft Office

The undisputed heavyweight champion of the office continues to reign supreme as Microsoft Office is still the most flexible and useful productivity application to date. That's not to say, however, that it's the right software to use in any situation.

Most users are familiar with the core of Office, including Word, PowerPoint and Excel, but we don't really recommend users buy Office who simply need word processing or spreadsheets. Online office suites tend to do the basic tasks well enough that dropping $150 on the least expensive version of office seems laughable. PowerPoint, however, is still more robust than any free presentation app we've seen, so heavy presenters might still need to spend the cash. Business users needing the flexibility and integration of Outlook to manage a busy business life have to opt for the standard version, which costs $400.

The $450 and $500 versions of Office are the versions that we find most appealing. The $500 "professional" version of Office includes Microsoft Publisher, Microsoft Accounting Express and Microsoft Access. Publisher is a simplistic desktop publishing application business owners could use to create marketing materials, while Accounting Express is a simplistic accounting tool, and Access is a simplistic database engine for managing more complex business applications. The $450 "small business" version omits Access from the mix.

Which one is right for me?

The question we tell all technology users to ask themselves is: Do I feel constrained by my current situation? For office use, we definitely recommend a graduated approach to office document creation. Most people simply don't need Microsoft Office for daily productivity tasks. Instead, free software like Zoho or OpenOffice will usually suffice — so give those a try (at the whopping cost of free), spend some quality time with them and see if they fit your needs. However, if a user feels constrained by either of those two applications, we'd then recommend downloading evaluation versions of more costly software (iWork and MS Office) and doing a similar "real world" test to make sure the needs are met by the more expensive software.

Personally, I use Google Docs for most of my document creation, and I write all the articles for Obsessable in a simple text editor with a spell check (TextWrangler for the Mac). I find Zoho the most appealing office suite I've seen in a long time, but my workflow doesn't typically necessitate a full fledged office suite. What about you? Have you used one of these office suites with good results? Do you find a reason to pay for Office? Have you found a free presentation application that's better than PowerPoint? We'd love to get a good conversation going, so leave your thoughts in the comments.

[Photo: JimGrant]