Over on his Computerworld blog, Richi Jennings reports that the next release of the ubiquitous Microsoft Office suite – Office 2013 – is drawing nigh.
However, he also points out that a huge price increase is in the offing for those that decide to update to the new version.
But beware: The leaked Office 2013 pricing makes it seem that you’ll pay a lot more with the subscription model than buying the traditional, packaged software — as much as four times more!
Perhaps this would be a good time for those thinking of upgrading to change their choice of office suite instead. Why not take a look at an open source office suite, such as LibreOffice or OpenOffice – the office suite from which LibreOffice was forked? As long as you’re not heavily reliant upon MS Office macros, the change should not be too painful. I’ve been working with both LibreOffice and OpenOffice for well over 7 years and none of my clients has noticed any difference.
Both come with all the common elements of an office productivity suite – word processor, presentation package, spreadsheet, database, and the like and both can read and write MS Office formats. In addition, both work natively with the Open Document Format (ODF), an approved ISO international standard which is gaining more acceptance and wider use amongst governments and local authorities around the world as it will still be readable in years to come – unlike MS Office formats, whose useful life is purely dependent on Microsoft’s whim.