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Personalized Services for Individuals and Small Businesses

Office Suites


Choosing a professional office suite is very much like buying a car. The higher-priced models tend to offer more features and better performance. But value is in the eye of the beholder, and any one of the following business office suites may offer the best solution to your needs.

Freeware Office Suites
There are Free business software packages available for the fiscally challenged, and some might be just right for a small or startup company. Some of these programs and suites even challenge the performance of their big name retail counterparts.

MS Office
The retail champion of office suites in the U.S., MicroSoft offers four levels of their latest Office. Includes Word word processing, Excel spreadsheets, Outlook email client, PowerPoint slide show creator, and in some editions, Access database, FrontPage web development, SharePoint contact management, and Developers Tools. Current Mac version is highly rated.

WordPerfect Office
The major office suite contender in the U.S. for many years, Corel continues to create a great product. Components include WordPerfect word processing, Quattro Pro spreadsheets, Presentations slide show creator, Paradox database, CorelCENTRAL personal information manager, and Dragon Naturally Speaking speech recognition. There is no longer a Mac version.

Lotus SmartSuite
IBM's own suite has always had a respectable presence. The suite includes WordPro word processing with voice recognition, 1-2-3 spreadsheet, Freelance slide show maker, Approach database, Organizer personal information manager, and something different: ScreenCam screen recording. OS/2 version of SmartSuite is also offered.

StarOffice
Sun MicroSystems offers this suite in several editions that can all run on Solaris, Windows and Linux operating systems interchangeably. All the MS Office-compatible components are there: word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, graphics and database capabilities, and the price is far below its major competitors. This is a more robust, retail version of OpenOffice (see Freeware Office Suites.

AppleWorks
Now compatible with MS Word and Excel, Apple's AppleWorks comes in both Mac and Windows versions. With word processing, spreadsheets, painting, drawing, presentations and databases, the entire office suite lineup covers all the fundamental bases.

Works
MicroSoft's baby brother of MS Office XP, Works includes the latest version of MS Word (a mini suite in itself), plus Money, Encarta Encyclopedia, Picture It! Photo, and Streets & Trips. The program can share data with WindowsCE and Palm devices.

ThinkFree Office
A simple yet powerful, inexpensive office suite written entirely in Java, enabling Windows, Mac, Linux and UNIX users access to the exact same functions. The four major components are Write word processing, Calc spreadsheets, Show slide show maker, and Folders, a Windows Explorer-like file tree. They are all perfectly compatible with MS Office.

Ability Office
An inexpensive Windows-based suite with a lot more integration between its components than most other office suites. The word processor, spreadsheet, MS Access-compatible database, and Adobe PhotoShop-compatible graphics programs have the ability to access each other seamlessly. The word processor can import MS Word documents and tables, and can also save in PDF and HTML.