OpenOffice.org
OpenOffice.org is the granddaddy of Office alternatives. A product for nearly 20 years, the current version is available in 21 different languages on platforms that include Windows, Linux (RPM and Debian), Solaris (SPARC and x86), and Mac OS X (Intel and PowerPC). It's widely available, well supported (through active user and developer communities), and stable. The question remains: Is it good enough to be your only personal productivity suite?

The word processor (screen image) has a look that will seem familiar to folks who have been using Word for a number of years. When you dig into the interface, you find that OpenOffice.org includes many features that are missing from other products in this comparison, such as mail merge and style galleries for business users, as well as bibliography, footnote, and cross-reference functions for academic and research users. There are also multimedia capabilities for Web 2.0 folks (extending to video and audio), along with HTML-editing features when you want to take your documents directly online.

In some areas, OpenOffice.org has user interface features that make common capabilities easier to employ than they are in competing programs. Inserting a table, for example, brings out a floating toolbar for sizing and formatting the table without having to resort to multiple trips to a menu structure. That's nice, as is the word processor's native PDF output ability. The only features that seem significantly lacking are those for collaborating with multiple authors; you can insert a note, but more sizable collaboration capability would be welcome.

OpenOffice.org's spreadsheet (screen image) is a capable numeric- and data-analysis tool, with an interface that will look more familiar to longtime Excel users than the revamped ribbon scheme of Office 2007 did. On the issue of macros, OpenOffice.org's spreadsheet and word processor both support them, but they're not the same macros that run in Office. They're similar, being based on Basic, but there are differences between Office's VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) and OpenOffice.org's Basic API. This is yet another case in which each of the products is a capable tool, and each will open documents created by the other (assuming, of course, that you save the files in the proper format), but you shouldn't assume that you can blithely toss complex files back and forth between the suites with no intervention required.

The presentation creator that comes with OpenOffice.org is fully featured, with superb capabilities for sorting and organizing slides, and a very nice wizard that can get you started if you're unsure about how to begin your presentation. As with the word processor, there are multimedia capabilities, so you can easily build a business presentation around the latest video you found on YouTube.

The verdict, then, is that OpenOffice.org is entirely capable of being the primary, or only, personal productivity suite used by an organization. There are two large caveats in this statement. First, the collaboration capabilities of OpenOffice.org are not on a par with those found in either Microsoft Office or Google Docs. It's not that two or more individuals can't collaborate on a document in OpenOffice.org; it's just that they'll have to bring in additional products or work harder to do it. Second, if you want to use business intelligence or other enterprise applications that depend on Excel macros, you can't run them directly in OpenOffice.org. With custom programming, you'll be able to do a great deal, but once again, you're looking at additional investment to make things work.

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Google Docs
IBM Lotus Symphony
OpenOffice.org
Zoho