The world today is heavy with MS office usage. Riding on corporate buying, the desktops have been shipped with pre installed MS Windows and MS Office suites in almost 90% of the hardware purchases. But of late there are some very good Office appls should you decide to switch on to the Linux.

Topping the list is the OpenOffice.org from Sun Microsystems. The version 3.2 is comparable to what MS Office offers today. The app comes bundled with all Linux distros and include:

• Writer – a word processor that natively exports PDF files.
• Calc – a spreadsheet application also with PDF support.
• Impress – a presentation program which can export to SWF & PDF and handle PowerPoint files.
• Base – a database program similar to Access.
• Draw – a vector image editor.
• Math – a tool for calculating mathematical formulae.

GNOME office is another suite designed for GNOME platform. Though it is not in the same league as that of OpenOffice but still it is quite a handy tool. It comprises of :

• AbiWord – a word processor with support for the OpenOffice.org (.ODT) format.
• Evince – included with your normal GNOME installation for viewing documents, including PDFs.
• Evolution – an email client, also included as part of GNOME.
• GNUMeric – a basic spreadsheet application.
• Ease – for creating presentations, still in development.
• Inkscape – a popular vector image editor and presentation tool.

And who can forget Google Docs and Microsoft Web Apps. These two are wonderful web based apps and need an internet connection to work on. They are not strictly Linux based applications but they work irrespective of the operating systems. They are cloud based apps.

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Microsoft Office Web Apps vs Google Docs