Introduction

I’m a big OpenOffice fan. I believe that it is better than Microsoft Word for simple tasks and that it should be installed on every student’s computer. Lately, I’m becoming painfully aware of OpenOffice’s problems. An example is the news that OpenOffice is getting slower with each new release.

Google Docs

For all operating systems with a modern browser, there is the well-known Google Docs. While it has some annoyances with collaboration, it is still a pretty good online word processor. It’s fast, it’s powerful considering that it’s entirely an online application, and there is the fact that it ties in with a Google account, which many of us have.

It’s also a handy place to backup important documents, access them anywhere, and then edit them online with only a browser.

UPDATE: Adobe has launched it’s own online suite of applications. I haven’t tried it out at the time of writing, but you can read more at ReadWriteWeb.

Go-OO

Go-OO is a fork of OpenOffice that has some neat-o-rama things that a lot of us really wish were in OpenOffice itself. It’s available for Windows and Linux.

KOffice

I’m a KDE fanatic, so what else did you expect here? I think that KOffice is an excellent suite of applications with tight integration. KWord, like OpenOffice, uses the OpenDocument format, so you have no worries there.