Roundup
ROUNDUP WE COMPARE Office TONS suites OF STUFF SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO!
Michael Reed
» LibreOffice 7.1 » OnlyOffice 6.2
» WPS Office 2019 11.1
» FreeOffice 2018 r982 » Calligra 3.2.1
Michael’s tech journey started when, aged six, he used an Apple II with a green screen monitor.
Office suites
Michael Reed compares five fully featured office suites, testing them on a modern computing setup as well as with older hardware.
HOW WE TESTED…
The text for this month’s Roundup was created by continually moving it between the word processor modules of the various office suites. We also loaded various test files, in the standard formats that you’re likely to encounter, into as many of the modules as we could, making notes of the speed and accuracy of this process along the way.
As well as using a desktop PC, we also ran the suites on a rather outdated laptop, an old eMachines model with 2GB of RAM, a 1.7GHz CPU and a 1,024x600 display. This is to test to see if the suite could be used to bring an older machine back to life for light office duties –a valid application for an office suite.
We also spent some time on the support forums and other web resources to make sure that they were all going concerns with a future that makes them worth investing time into.
O ffice applications have seen many improvements since the first spreadsheet and word processing programs were made available for personal computers. However, what you do with the programs that handle the core office activities hasn’t changed a great deal. These activities include creating text documents, using a spreadsheet or a database and putting together graphs and presentation data.
Note that two of the suites – WPS Office and FreeOffice – have picked up an annoying habit from Microsoft of naming the current release after a given year and then not incrementing it in subsequent years. So, we’re looking at the latest versions of all of the suites (they were updated in 2021) even though they are entitled WPS Office 2019 and FreeOffice 2018.
Office suites span two extremes of integration: some offer specialised views on the given document within a common interface; at the other end of the scale, some are literally separate applications that are installed together.
Some of these suites come in more than one flavour, for example, an Android or web version, and OnlyOffice itself can be served over the web. We’ll make mention of these, where appropriate, but we’re primarily concerned with desktop applications that run directly in Linux.
Core office
applications
How do the five office suites on test handle the basics?
T here’s room for debate on the matter, but we consider the core office applications to be: word processing, spreadsheet, presentations and database. LibreOffice and Calligra have all of these, and the applications themselves are fully featured in each case. The same is true for FreeOffice, OnlyOffice and WPS Office, except they don’t come with a database.
As for the modules themselves, they all offer the basic facilities. In the case of word processing, you’re more likely to make your decision due to personal preference about the user interface rather than because of a lack of essential functions. In addition to the basic facilities that most users need, each of the word processors have features for more advanced, graphical layouts.