ONLYOFFICE: the best alternative to Microsoft Office
While Microsoft offers us a suite of paid programs (either with a single payment, or paying every month), ONLYOFFICE offers us a totally free and open source alternative. This suite brings us a word processor, a spreadsheet program and software to create and reproduce presentations designed to provide us with the best compatibility with Microsoft Office programs, both when saving in their formats (DOCX, XLSX and PPTX) as well as to open programs created with Word, Excel or PowerPoint.
Within the ONLYOFFICE suite we will find several editions. On the one hand, we are going to have the Desktop Editors. This is the recommended edition to install on personal computers, as it is compatible with Windows, Linux, and macOS. This edition will install on our computer everything necessary to be able to have the office programs offered by this suite at any time.
On the other hand, we have ONLYOFFICE Personal, an office suite in the cloud that will allow us to open, create and edit documents depending exclusively on the browser and an Internet connection, without having to download or install anything on the PC. Even if we want to have full control over the suite and our files, ONLYOFFICE allows us set up our own office suite in the cloud, either for free through the Community Edition, or by paying for a private server, and controlled by them, through the Enterprise and Developer Editions. And, of course, we cannot forget about the Android and iOS versions of this suite.
Get to know what’s new in ONLYOFFICE 6.4
The developers of this office suite have just released a new version of this suite with which to further shorten the gap with its Microsoft rival. From now on, the new suite is available, free of charge, for anyone interested in trying it, both within Windows and in macOS and Linux. The news are also available in the office suite in the cloud, both in the one that the platform offers us and in the one that we can assemble ourselves.
Changes in Document, the word processor
Document is the ONLYOFFICE alternative to Word. This word processor has also received a ration of improvements and news highly requested by users. The first one is the ability to convert any text into a table with a couple of clicks instead of having to create the table from scratch and copy the text into it. In addition, it has the possibility of choosing the order in which we want to import the data, and if we want to create it in plain text, without formatting.
Also, as of this new version 6.4, when we write a new sentence, the first letter will always be capitalized automatically. This novelty is also available in the presentation tool, as we will see below.
What’s new in Spreedshets, spreadsheets
The second of the programs we are going to talk about is the spreadsheet software, the ONLYOFFICE suite. The new version 6.4 of the program has received a series of news and improvements that are highly anticipated by users. Among them, one of the most important is, finally, the conditional format to improve the reading of the sheets, analyze the results and see trends more easily. From now on, users can create our own conditional formats, configure them with the colors we want and apply them to the ranges we want to process.
Another novelty that we can find in this new version are the mini graphics. Thanks to it, we will be able to create miniature graphics within a cell to better analyze and represent all kinds of results. And we cannot forget about a very requested function, which is the possibility to import text content and csv files to spreadsheets.
And some minor changes, such as improvements when creating and assigning macros, the ability to show (or not) zeros, and bug fixes.
Presentation, the news of the presentation program
Third, let’s see what’s new in Presentation, the great alternative to PowerPoint. In addition to the new function that is responsible for capitalizing the beginning of each sentence, this program has also received some very interesting functions. The first one is document versioning. From now on we will be able to see a version history when we have a presentation and return to any of these versions if necessary.
Furthermore, thanks to this new version system, when the user closes the program, the current status of the presentation will be saved by default as one more version, and can be easily restored at any time.
Other changes to the suite
But ONLYOFFICE’s core programs aren’t the only aspects of the suite that have received changes. If we use these programs for collaborative work with other people or co-workers, from now on we will be able to work much better with comments, brands, questions and see clarifications clearer. Comments can be deleted or resolved more quickly with a couple of clicks, and the API has also been updated so that those who have their own suites built can take full advantage of the possibilities of co-editing documents. Users can now be in different groups and have different permissions.
Other changes that we can highlight are:
- New scales for zooming documents, presentations and spreadsheets: 125% and 175%.
- New color settings to improve the readability of the tables to the color blind.
- The API allows users using 05 in the cloud to set the theme (light or dark) by default.
- Support for Web Application Open Platform Interface (WOPI).
How to download the new version
The new ONLYOFFICE 6.4 is now available to all users. Anyone who wants to start testing these new features can do, free of charge, simply by updating the suite to this new version. To do this, we simply have to go to their website to download the latest version of ONLYOFFICE and follow the installation wizard to update it. If we use Docs, these news will already be available. And if we have our own cloud, we will have to update by hand, unless we pay for the maintenance.
Of course, we must bear in mind that at this time all the news of the new version 6.4 will only appear in ONLYOFFICE Docs and will be available in the cloud. But do not worry, we can enjoy all this in the desktop app a little later.
We must remember that, unlike Microsoft Office, this suite is open source. So if we want to see or download the code, we can do it directly from its GitHub repository.