Who beats MS Office

As a professional of finance and accounting spreadsheets among others such word processors or ERP´s, are in a daily basis, tools I use. Obviously I have been using for ages Microsoft Office suites in many versions, from 95 up to 2007 (I am going to go for 2010 as I have read many good reviews) and mainly for Windows but also for Mac OS, but this more for personal rather than professional purposes. I have to say that the spreadsheet and presentations are the one I use the most and I have deeper knowledge.

Now I work full time for a open source IT company where I run Finance and Accounting department and I been asked to use Open Office as well as Google Docs. Well, let me tell you they are not as good as MS Office. I have recently used iWork as well, the Apple Office suite, and it disappoints me too.

Open Office is a badly copy of MS Office and it is very poor, doesn’t add anything at all and it looks quite awful. Google Docs is a great idea for sharing and file management and it is in the cloud so accessible from anywhere with only and Internet connection but still work over a browser a massive amount of data is not very handy and there are tons of features to develop in there. iWorks is beautiful as almost everything made by Apple, stunning at your eye but extremely poor at features and management data.

Features as pivot table or filtering are very well designed at Excel and or does not exist or work very poorly in the others. That´s true there is couple of them out there I have not tried yet such Corel WordPerfect Office or Lotus Symphony suite. I will try them once. But, by now and for me, it is hard to think somebody could beat MS Office.