There will be yet another version of Microsoft Office released next year, and here is what Bill Gates declared recently to whet our appetites. Office 12 will, he says, make it easier for workers to “focus, prioritise and apply their expertise, visualise and understand key data, and reduce the amount of time they spend dealing with the complexity of an information-rich environment”.

Oh dear. It makes you want to run and hide, doesn’t it? Office, like Windows, is a piece of Microsoft that squatted in our lives years ago and doggedly refuses to leave. For the most part, it is pretty good and, if you qualify for the sub-£100 edition for parents, teachers and students, reasonably priced, though not if you pay the full £400-plus for the professional version.

But it is a monster. I have been using Word since the first half- decent version came out in 1984. At some point over the past two decades, it became fat, bloated and stuffed full of features most of us do not want, even if we understand them in the first place.

Increasingly, there are alternatives. OpenOffice.org (www.openoffice.org) has been around for years for Windows, Macs and Linux machines, but has always looked like a poor imitation of the real thing. Finally, Version 2.0 is about to appear — a beta version can be found in the download area on the website — and it ought to be giving someone at Microsoft nightmares.

OpenOffice.org now punches like a contender, with a word- processor, spreadsheet, drawing tool and database that, for most people, should do the trick. Elegant and simple, it can open and save common Office files, so you can view documents sent to you from people who stick with Microsoft. It is also absolutely free, and, increasingly, is bundled with versions of Linux that are attractive ways to revive ageing PCs.

Novell’s Suse Linux Professional 9.3 (£65), for example, includes OpenOffice.org, two Outlook e-mail clones and real paper manuals, and will happily coexist alongside Windows on your PC if you have a spare 5GB of storage space.

There are alternatives on the Mac, too. Recently, I gave up writing books in Word and changed to software called Mellel (www.redlers.com). It is fast, powerful and, unlike Word, easily handles the structure of long, complex documents, such as books and academic theses. Mellel is truly multilingual, too — you could, if you wanted, write one paragraph in English, the next in Italian and the third, from right to left, in accurate Farsi script. Try that in Word. How much? Less than £22. Annoyingly, though, for the vast majority of home computer users, it runs only on the Mac.

I tried a practical test on my own laptops to see what these changes in software mean in real terms. Starting up the laptop PC on Windows took 110 seconds, then 10 seconds to open a 145,000-word file. It then loaded Suse in 80 seconds and opened the aforementioned document in OpenOffice.org in eight seconds. The Apple PowerBook booted in a speedy 42 seconds, and Mellel was ready to edit the same book in only seven seconds. In short, Microsoft came last on every count.

These are challenging times for Mr Gates and his crew. Next year, Microsoft will give us not just a new Office, but a new version of Windows, too. If it goes down the Office route — more bloat, more complexity, more demands for memory and speed — then lots of us will indeed be “reducing the amount of time we spend dealing with the com-plexity of an information-rich environment”.

And we will do it by trying something else.
david.hewson@sunday-times.co.uk

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