Yes, it's great news that Microsoft will be releasing a new version of Microsoft Office for the Mac, but before calling in your credit card number, you should check out a free, open-source alternative: NeoOffice.

Siag Office is an office suite for Unix systems which contains a spreadsheet, (Siag), a word processor, (Pathetic Writer) and an image animation program, (Egon) as well as a file manager, (XFiler), a text editor, (XedPlus) and a postscript document viewer (Gvu).

Under the name Sun ODF Plug-in for Microsoft Office, Sun has released its import/export filter for the OpenDocument format (ODF), which the ISO has recognized as a standard, for versions 2000, XP, and 2003 of Microsoft's Office suite; the plug-in can be downloaded via our software repository.

Computer giant IBM yesterday released a free office suite for Windows and Linux machines called Lotus Symphony.

This is a guide with code samples, screenshots, and two screencast of how to install Microsoft Office 2007 on Linux with Wine. Microsoft Office 2007 (officially called 2007 Microsoft Office system) is the most recent version of Microsoft's productivity suite.

IBM calls its new office productivity suite, built upon OpenOffice, Lotus Symphony. This disappoints two groups. The first group, fans like me of OpenOffice, wish it kept the OpenOffice name to help further the open cause. The second group wishes the old Lotus Symphony office suite, an early competitor to Microsoft Office, had climbed out of the grave.

My take from the cheap seats: Keep an eye on the Windows fight if you like, but the Office game is where you'll be seeing the most action. Players are already trash-talking about office document formats. IBM is rolling out a free Office competitor called Symphony and it's lining up a formal match.

Michael Meeks is a distinguished engineer at Novell. But his current project may be his toughest yet. He is in charge of tackling interoperability between Novell's OpenOffice.org productivity suite and Microsoft Office. And as with anything relating to Microsoft, this involves more than just technology.

Some may or may not know that KDE comes with its own built in Office suite known as Koffice. What even fewer people may know is what it actually contains. So in this segment about the Lesser Apps of KDE, we'll be covering Koffice, what it contains and what each part can do for you.