Microsoft's upcoming Office 2010 is currently in public beta release and will be available for retail purchase later this year, but some users and businesses do not want to use Office 2010 or even the current Office 2007. While Office 2010 offers many innovative features, there are other productivity suite alternatives, both software-based and cloud based.

Before we explore the other productivity suite alternatives, it might be good to take a look at our Office 2010 beta review, which gives you a complete rundown of any new features, improvements, and shortcomings that Office 2010, in our opinion, has.

After taking a look at Office 2010, some may feel that is has left a bad taste in their mouths, particularly when it comes to a few issues. One such issue is the price, which can be rather expensive. For the most basic version available through retail markets, Office Home and Student, which comes with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, and the Office Web Apps, cost $149 for a full boxed copy and $120 for a product key card. While $150 may be well-worth it for some, for others they may bulk at that price. This is all the more reason to go with an alternative productivity suite. For more details on the Office 2010 pricing and versions, visit our article about it at the Tech News Blog.

Another dislike that some users are expressing over Office 2010 is its bulkiness and complexity. Since the creation of the ribbon interface that replaces the traditional menu system in Office 2007, some users have been a little outraged that there's no option to revert to the old menu system. The ribbon menu can be a little daunting for the inexperienced or users that have become accustomed to the traditional menus.

Some may also dislike the poor performance of some of the programs, particularly Outlook, the e-mail and calendar software. It is a rather "large" program that has been known to be a poor performer in the past, even on the most high-end systems. In Office 2010, Outlook has been dramatically improved, both in terms of speed and features. We have noticed that on a midline desktop PC, it does run rather well, but it can vary from user to user.

OpenOffice

OpenOffice.org is a free, open-source office software suite that provides software for word processing, spreadsheet creation, presentations, sketching, and database. It is completely free and is open-source, meaning that the public is its own developer where skilled individuals contribute to the overall program's code and makeup. This means they're constantly adding features and some may even say that it works better overall because it has a wider test-base and benefits from public-code interaction.

Writer, the Microsoft Word alternative application, offers much of the same features that Word does, including font-styling, document formatting, spell check, charting and graphics features, and more. Most every feature available in Word has a duplicate feature in Writer that works just as well or if not better.

OpenOffice.org can also be used on as many computers as you like without going through any software activation or any other hoops that Microsoft Office puts you through. Even corporations with thousands of computers can use OpenOffice completely free on every single computer without any licenses or anything. If you run a small business and don't want to spend thousands for Microsoft Office licenses, OpenOffice is your best, free alternative.

We should mention, however, that as of now the latest version of OpenOffice is not officially compatible with Windows 7, but it can be installed for many users and it works successfully. There have been a few reports of installation issues or problems while running the software in Windows 7. These issues will be fixed soon with a new release of OpenOffice in early 2010.

Learn more and download OpenOffice at OpenOffice.org

Google Docs

Google Docs from Google is a cloud-based office suite, meaning that it runs completely within a Web browser and can be used to store your documents on the Internet and not on your local computer. This allows you to be able to access your saved documents from any computer connected to the Internet with a Web browser.

Google Docs lets you create documents, presentations, spreadsheets, and forms. The word processing Web application is very sleek and simple to use and offers a lot of features too. You can edit font styles, insert graphics/charts/images/equations/tables/drawings, edit document/paragraph properties, translate documents, and much more. It does have a very well-designed spell-check and an autosave feature to prevent data loss in case of a power failure or browser crash. It does have some limitations as the more advanced features that Microsoft Word has, like citation management, isn't available in Google Docs.

The presentation and spreadsheet applications work very nicely as well and contain many of the basic features, but again lack the more advanced options and features found in their Office counterparts.

All of the Google Doc programs allow you to save the files to the Google servers for later access or you can save and download them to your local computer in a variety of formats, such as .doc, .html, .pdf, etc.

Google Docs is an excellent, free alternative for users who are frequently on-the-go that need to be able to access their documents from anywhere in the World. It's also great for users that want a no-fuss, easy to use office system that doesn't cost a penny.

Learn more and try Google Docs at docs.google.com