Hi all, i'm looking for an alternative for Microsoft office for linux or any recommendations.

Thanks.

I recommend - in that order - Open Office and Libre Office.

Have a look at these:

- OpenOffice
- LibreOffice
- kOffice

Koffice is now Calligra, which is included in slackware.

I recommend Libreoffice, and Gnumeric for spreadsheets. Libreoffice has it's own spreadsheets, but I don't like them.

There are two Office alternatives, both of which are complete, work fine and allow you to both open MS Office documents, spread sheets and the like, work on them and save them back as MS Office files or as OpenDocument files. These are LibreOffice and OpenOffice.

Over the past year or two there has been a great deal of controversy resulting from Oracle's purchase of Sun Microsystems -- years ago Sun bought what was then StarOffice, put together a team that improved StartOffice ultimately releasing it as OpenOffice (open source and free to download and use). When Oracle bought Sun the OpenOffice developers spun off OpenOffice to LibreOffice on their own over concern about what Oracle would do with OpenOffice (Oracle has a well-earned reputation for doing naughty things with open source software among other things). LibreOffice was and still is in many ways OpenOffice although some differences have crept in.

In the meantime, Oracle gave (or sold for a dollar or whatever) OpenOffice to the Apache Foundation and Apache has been allocating resources to OpenOffice, improving it, adding function and the like (LibreOffice has been doing the same thing). Oracle also acquired Java with the Sun purchase and what's going to happen with Java is still up in the air; but that's another story.

For me, I don't have the skill to create templates for use with Writer, the document program in LibreOffice and OpenOffice, the functional equivalent of MS Word. I can do a lot of stuff, but templates are just beyond the blue event horizon for me. So, I rely on a wide range of templates for creating documents, presentations and other tasks. OpenOffice had and still has a plethora of templates, LibreOffice did not initially but has increased both the number and usefulness of available templates. Simply because of that I have been inclined to stick with OpenOffice along with a certain faith in the Apache Foundation for the long haul. I sort of suspect that there will be a merger of OpenOffice and LibreOffice somewhere down the road (now that those rascally boys and girls at Oracle are out of the picture); maybe, maybe not but it does make economic sense.

You can, in fact, try them both and see which one you like. You may not be aware of SlackBuilds.org (http://www.slackbuilds.org) but that's where you get... uh, a huge selection, one might say, of applications, utilities, libraries and other software that you can quickly and easily build and install in your Slackware system(s). There are instructions there for how to install and use both OpenOffice and LibreOffice at the same time.

If, like me, you rely heavily on templates, you might want to install both and try out the available templates for each (many are the same but there are a bunch unique to one or the other) and see which of the two best fit your needs.

Hope this helps some.

1 members found this post helpful.

Softmaker Office is a proprietary alternative with a reasonable price tag and reasonable licensing.

Thanks for replies....are the appearances similar to Microsofts and workings, basically doing what you might do in Microsoft office seem quite similar in a linux version.

Yes, but not 100%. They do look- and work alike but there are little differences here and there. Overall, a MS Office user won't have a whole lot of difficulty adapting to either LibreOffice or OpenOffice and the documentation is quite good.

Oh, yeah, one big plus? No viruses or worms and the price it much, much righter.

It seems that there is something missing here.
As a part of MS Office there is also MS Outlook which is the most problematic part of MS Office package (when you are looking for alternatives in linux).
I would also note the MS Office Access - which is a local database package - with the "Base" as the alternative in OpenOffice (or LibreOffice).

MS Office is not just the Word and the Excel application.

For email there is the Kmail as a possible solution. But Thunderbird is also very popular email client with lots of plugins. For calendaring you can use the Korganizer or the Thunderbirds Lightning.

I cannot get away from the fact that we have an exchange server. Luckily, they use Outlook Web Access -OWA and BES for the blackberry and iphoney users.

My desktop runs on LibreOffice, Thunderbird with Lightning, and connects using DevMail.

I use LibreOffice. I regular receive, update and return MS documents, mostly word pressing and spreadsheets. The folks on the other end have no idea I use LibreOffice.