Office suites, word processors and spreadsheets

StarOffice

StarOffice is a complete, full-featured office suite on the idea of Microsoft Office. It comes complete with word processor (of course), spreadsheet, database interfacing, presentation software plus it offers web browsing and email and a few other features. Originally developed by StarDivision, StarOffice was acquired by Sun Microsystems in 1999. The current stable version of this suite is 5.2 at the time of this writing. However, Sun has announced that they plan to charge for downloads of StarOffice version 6.

KOffice

KOffice is the KDE Project's offering for desktop productivity. It includes all of the standard office suite applications. The software is offered free of charge.

VistaSource's Anywhere Desktop for Linux

This suite was formerly known as ApplixWare. Once again, all the standard office suite tool are offered here. This one boasts a Microsoft Office look and feel. This is not a free product. It cost 99 US dollars at the time of this writing.

Siag Office

Don't let a name like Pathetic Writer dissuade you from checking out this office suite for Linux. The word processor part of the suite can open Microsoft Word format (*.doc) files. The project started with the Scheme in a grid spreadsheet. Now you know why it's called Siag. Another free offering in the office category.

HancomOffice for Linux

Hancom Linux of Korea has developed this commercial full-featured office suite for Linux. Provides compatibility with Microsoft Office formats and smooth integrating into the KDE desktop. An evaluation version is available for download, but the software must be purchased in order to continue to use it.

GNOME Office

GNOME office should actually appear in quotes, because this is not an office suite in the classic sense, but a set of applications that are often associated with office suites, as a package deal, so to speak. Some of the high-lights include:

• Gnumeric, a spreadsheet application
• AbiWord, a word processor (it even runs under Windows and MacOS)
• Gnucash, a personal finance manager
• GNOME-DB, database connectivity software

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