Using Office in Your Office

Our computers are, in the most basic sense, tools. They’re tools for education, they’re tools for blowing off steam and they’re tools for productivity. Arguably it’s this ability to create, produce and construct which is the PC’s strongest suit, because anything else you might use a computer for was actually itself, created on a computer. The chicken vs. egg discussion aside, the landscape of programs we can use to get things done with a keyboard and a screen is vast. Where to start, then? And how can we maybe save some cash along the way?

The most famous and successful of all the productivity suites is by far and away Microsoft Office. First released in 1990, MS Office 1.0 combined Word, Excel and PowerPoint for the first time in a consumer release. While Word and Excel had already seen popularity for years before that, this marked the introduction of the Microsoft tax we love to hate. In 2017, Microsoft moved to a subscription based model with Office 365, breaking up the hundreds of dollars the suite would typically cost into a more manageable monthly payment. What’s interesting and often less talked about though are the alternatives to the Microsoft family of products. What if you lack the budget for the name-brand option? Well as it happens, while they’re sometimes a compromise, there’s tons of alternatives to the big names.

When it comes to word processing, spreadsheets or presentations, the big competition is actually Apple’s productivity tools of Pages, Numbers and Keynote. The nice thing is they come natively bundled with Apple’s products, so there’s no additional costs involved. They’re my go-to, and this article is rather fittingly being written with Pages on my Mac. Fun fact. Seeking out the free alternatives to these options, a suite called LibreOffice is orders of magnitude the most popular. It includes everything you’d get from the paid options, just with a little bit less polish and intuition baked in. It also works on Windows, Mac and for fans of going “free” for their operating system also, Linux!

What if you’d like to go beyond that and edit some photos? Adobe’s Creative Cloud, containing Photoshop, Lightroom and Illustrator has been the go-to for years now. There’s tons of great learning material about it, and it’s pretty affordable at the entry level. Zero dollar options exist here too though! The raunchily named GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a great, powerful, easy to learn Photoshop alternative which is completely free to use. For the photo processing you’d typically perform in Lightroom, there’s Darktable. The continued theme here to remember is these programs will be slightly less effortless to use, and look slightly less pretty than their paid alternatives. As with anything, our friend the tradeoff exist.

This is by no means at all an exhaustive list, of course. If you’re into video game creation, or music making, or video editing; there is almost certainly a free tool to help you work with it. A quick internet search, some YouTube videos and some trial and error can easily see you chasing ideas you may have been putting off due to the cost of entry. A little care must be taken to ensure you don’t end up inadvertently downloading something sketchy, but the more popular freebie solutions will have online communities which serve both as a learning resource and a testament to legitimacy. So chase down that pet ‘puter project! The tools you need are out there, and they’re even quite likely to be everyone’s favorite price…