Which Office Suite to Use? Depends...

Most people will automatically say you should use Microsoft Office (MS Office). In fact, most people may not even know that free or paid alternatives to MS Office exist. Take a few minutes and get to know the two biggest free alternatives.

OpenOffice, LibreOffice and MS Office
OpenOffice and LibreOffice are both free alternatives to MS Office. Both OpenOffice and LibreOffice have pluses and minuses. OpenOffice converts documents to MS Office much better than LibreOffice. LibreOffice pretty much does everything else better than OpenOffice besides exporting documents to MS Office.

If you deal with spreadsheets on a daily basis, I still recommend and use MS Excel. Excel is unparalleled in this arena. This is the only Microsoft product I still use. 

Two questions to ask if MS Office alternatives are for you.

• Do you collaborate using MS Office documents on a daily basis?
• Do you work in spreadsheets often? 

A yes to either of the above will signals you need to have MS Office. If you get a no to both of those questions you can feel free to use OpenOffice, LibreOffice, or any number of office suites that you choose. 

You can be like me and use Excel for spreadsheets and then choose any number of Word Processors that play well with MS Word files. I have not used MS Word in 7 years and I handle almost all of my word processing efforts using, Nisus Writer Pro or Pages. 

I also use Keynote for presentations, but I don't prepare a lot of presentations these days. I feel that sending out the material a head of time for review is good enough. I just don't believe in presentations at work.

Good luck!