Sometimes “free” doesn’t guarantee the best deal. After reading our Item #3 last week, ” 3) A Free Version of Microsoft Office 365 for Non-profits,” Tim pointed out that many of our readers might be happier with the $2/month version of Office, which basically gave them all the capabilities of Office Standard. He wrote, “That is a very good price for the office suite. It takes a bit of headache to get switched over, but, so long as you have a good Internet connection, it can be a huge blessing once it is set up.” Of course, that Internet connection is key. After reading the same item, “Randy” wrote, “We supposedly live in a connected world. It seems to me that the newer software versions require connectedness. But is that so in missions? Besides traveling in many locations where there is no internet presence in other continents my wife and I have taught this past year in missions training locations in California and Florida that had limited or no functioning internet connections.” Randy’s right. Office 365 and other such “online” software is only good if you have always-on Internet. That works for many; but maybe you’re not one of the “always on internet” folks. Randy continued, “Maybe I have misunderstood the MS 365 marketing. I have still chosen use pay-for editions that help me feel in control when I am away from the internet. If budget is the problem maybe we should also consider the Open Office or other software that so many of or national colleagues in other places use?”
We can fully resonate with you, Randy. And speaking of free, the Open Office version (an Open Source version of a set of tools much like Microsoft Office) is available for free at…
https://www.openoffice.org/download/
I’m with Randy. I just returned from a week in Africa using very challenging internet. I can’t imagine depending on Office 365 for my primary office tool. Even if it’s free, unless you have dependable internet, it might not be the best deal for you. Maybe Open Office is a better deal. (Thanks for your thoughts, Tim and Randy.)
If a person is able to get to a location where they have decent internet speed, the Office365 non-profit business premium license allows users to download the FULL desktop version on up to five different machines.
Office 365 Nonprofit Business Premium
“Full, installed Office applications Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Publisher, and OneNote on up to 5 PCs or Macs”
That’s pretty good for only two bucks a month.
http://products.office.com/en-us/nonprofit/office-365-nonprofit-plans-and-pricing
I primarily use the free Google suite (Google Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, etc). They have added offline functionality and the ability to work with Microsoft documents as well as Open Office documents. The suite also works on mobile devices. I think it is one of the better solutions.
“Free” for anything always needs to be viewed with a measure of skepticism, especially services. With “free” although there occasions when there’s stuff that’s given away for reasons of altruism (or in Christian circles, ministry), somebody is covering the costs of development and provision. Thus, you have to ask the question of what the provider is getting from providing something that is not deriving money directly from the user, in some form. Sometimes, the provider is up-front about providing this information, but it’s common that things are done more underhandedly — perhaps not outright untruths, but certainly things that are misleading. And there’s a lot of expectation that users will accept default settings, and mindlessly click “I agree” to Terms of Service and End User License Agreements, where unacceptable things can be buried deep in legal fine print.
Much of the time, if you’re not paying for something, you’re not the customer, you’re the product that’s being sold. For providers such as Google or Facebook, the reason that they’re “free” is that they’re there to induce their users to entrust information to them, that they can turn into revenue streams. And it’s not just stored data, such as email content, search terms and click-throughs, it’s things such as associations and reputations. For some things, there probably isn’t any significant problem, but if there is, by the time you suspect something, it’s generally too late. For the information that providers have extracted, they generally consider themselves to be the owners of that information, and the end user has no control over how it’s going to be used. Thus, no way of denying use, deleting or correcting.
This is also a lesson that can be learned from the current Lenovo fiasco, over the Superfish malware. For entry-level computers there is almost zero profit for manufacturers and retailers, and as a result, there is considerable pressure to find additional revenue, usually through paid-for-placement add-on software (most of which is advertising, in some form). It’s easy to want to minimize the cost of a new computer, but for many, problems caused by add-on software are enough that it’s often more cost effective to pay more for the computer (i.e., where the price paid is actually reflective of the true cost of the machine), than having to clean up all problems imposed by add-on software.
As for web-based services, free or not, the world is moving from a setup where people do significant amounts of computing work on their own machines, to where individual computers are little more than Internet terminals. That assumes near ubiquitous and unlimited internet connectivity. That may work in Western countries, but is far less frequent in the Global South, where connectivity and supporting infrastructure are far more limited, and expensive.
If you work in a developing country, it’s a mistake to be especially reliant on web-based services, because it may be far more difficult to get to them. Plus, limitations aren’t just with general infrastructure — in countries where there are authoritarian governments, there’s also places where connectivity may be deliberately blocked, whether to individual sites, broad categories of sites, or even to the Internet entirely.
For office software, both OpenOffice or LibreOffice can be good options, but aren’t necessarily a panacea, and there can be limitations. Although Open/Libre and Microsoft Office will read each others’ document formats, the formats are different (especially with word processing), and if you have a document whose content is much more than simple text, conversion from one format to the other may not survive the transition well, especially the .DOCX format introduced in Office 2007. If you have Open or Libre, and you’re working alone (where you don’t normally share editable content with others), or you only share with other users of Open or Libre, you should be fine, but it generally does not work well for a group to have some people using Microsoft and some using Open or Libre — most of the time, everybody needs to be using one suite or the other.
One other significant consideration for Open and Libre for people with limited Internet is that updates both require new downloads of the full package, and there are no incremental updates. For Libre, that’s more than 200 MB.
(BTW, although both Open and Libre use identical document formats, LibreOffice is generally considered to be a little more advanced than OpenOffice. This goes back several years to a dispute within OpenOffice, of developers that were unhappy with Oracle’s sponsorship of the project, and split off to become a separate project. Since that time, Oracle transferred responsibility of OpenOffice to the Apache Foundation. Many (but not all) of OpenOffice’s developers moved to LibreOffice, and as a result, there are more frequent updates to LibreOffice, and Libre’s feature set is a little richer).
Referring to the question of “what does the provider get from ‘free'”?, in the case of OpenOffice and LibreOffice, both of these are projects where altruism is a significant factor.