Office Apps Alternatives to Microsoft’s package

You don’t have to use out-of-date office software

Are you looking for software for that neglected old Mac? SourceForge (sourceforge.net) and other repositories of open source software could be your secret weapon.

If you’re looking for office software, for instance, you have not one but two full-blown office suites to choose from, each featuring a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation program and database. Hardly surprising since they’re both based on the same source code, but there are subtle differences between the two.

The older of the two suites is Apache OpenOffice (formerly known as OpenOffice.org, or simply OOo). It’s based on the source code for Sun Microsystems’ office suite StarOffice, which was released to the open source community in 2000, and Apache OpenOffice is, as we’ve said, a fullyfeatured office suite, which can be downloaded free of charge from openoffice.org.

The other free office suite is LibreOffice, which is also based on StarOffice, and developed by former members of the OpenOffice.org community. You can download it from libreoffice.org/download.

Note that both of the download links above will offer you the version appropriate to your operating system and CPU, though this will be the US English version – so whichever you download, you’ll also need to download and install the British English language pack. For PowerPC Macs, however, we’d go for LibreOffice 4.0.6, the download link for which is bit.ly/1co5PLa.