For reasons that are not that interesting here, I’ve recently been asked the question "which computer should I buy?"

For most people the answer would be to pop down to their local computer shop, DigiTec here in Switzerland, PCWorld in England, Krefel or Vanden Borre in Belgium or Komplett in Sweden, armed with a wallet full of cash and will happily walk away with either the Deal of the Day or the most generic laptop for a little more than they really wanted to pay.

So how does one make a decision about which computer to buy? It does in the end come down to what one wants to do with the computer and, in equal measure, the budget. What has made life complicated for my partner was that they do not want, or need, a specialist machine. They will not be using it for online gaming, any form of DTP or video editing. All that is needed is a fairly middle of the road computer, to manage email, do some basic picture editing and of course reading interesting websites such as the history of pencils or the sounds of seashells. In the middle of the road market, the choice is astounding.

One of the main tasks that it will be used for will be writing; emails, word processor documents, some spreadsheet work and some presentational work.

There are three options:

Buy MS Office.
Microsoft office is of course the backbone of the vast majority of Office Suites and has been for longer than most people have been alive. However, Microsoft are now trying to get users to move to a monthly / annual subscription, around £60 / year rather than the buy it once, use it forever model of yore. Microsoft do indeed sell a version of Office for a one time fee, but finding this on Microsoft website is astonishingly difficult. Most of their links seem to end up back at the Subscription model.

There are of course some advantages tot he Subscription model, mostly that as the subscriber, Microsoft will always provide you with the very latest version of the software, the most recent features and a level of security. This could indeed be over kill for most users if the most that it will be used for will be some italic works, some bold and adding Chapter and Paragraph headings.

This will be fine for most people, although there is no MS Project included nor is Visio. Also, the cost of renting the software, which is essentially what a subscription service is, over a three year period, cold in fact be more than the cost of the machine itself. Remember, this is a subscription, so you will always be paying Microsoft.

Or will you ?

Free MS Office.
Microsoft offer two ways to access a free version of Office, one through a Windows phone, with the appropriate MS / Outlook account, or via the web, again through an Outlook account or Office account.

This will give you an online only Office light version. There are a limited number of fonts, editing features and functionality. There is an option to save documents to your local drive, print and save items to pdf. It also comes with a OneDrive storage volume, OneNote, again with limited, but useful functionality and the ability to save in a variety of formats, including some of the open formats used by non proprietary programmes.

For many people this will be enough, not least because you will be able to open other peoples documents, which may be the single most useful thing many people need.

Currently, there is no fee for this and, given that Google do continue to offer a seemingly free email service with Google Documents, it is likely that this cut down version will remain a free option for some time.

As with the subscription service there is no Visio or Project. However, as it is entirely online you can use the service from a Windows 10 machine, an Apple machine or any Linux desktop.

None MS Office Office.
For those who either don’t wish to use an online Office suite, or to pay a rent for software, there are lots of free / Open source Office suites available that are 100% MS Office compatible. I have used LibreOffice for some time, as well as it’s predecessor OpenOffice and before that, if my memory can stretch far enough, StarOffice. As it is a download programme it can be used either online or off line, so for the frequent traveller / workers this may be a good option.

It is available for Windows, Apple and of course Linux machines. Apart from MS Office, it is the next biggest office suite. You can open, edit, save in MS Formats. And it is not short of options. It comes with Writer [Word], Calc [Excel], Impress [Powerpoint], and Draw [Visio]. There is no Project included, but, as you will know form my earlier writings on open source Project software, there is a plethora of choice, at least for Linux users.

LibreOffice is not the only free office suite available. Softmaker FreeOffice, WPS Office, formerly Kingsoft Office, Google Docs’, Calligra Suite and Zoho Office are all very notable, free alternatives which are available either 100% online or as a download.

Although so far I have only covered Office software, this is an import decision to resolve, because it will impact on the next decision to make, the Operating System, which will be covered in a later post.