# General Business Category > Technology Forum > [Article] Good Open Source Alternative for Paid Software, that are Free.

## solweb

PC Software is expensive - here are 3 Free Alaternatives that I use and recommend

No matter what you use your computer for, one of the most valuable programs on it will be an Office Suite. You can use it to write letters, catalogue your recipe collection, draw up a spreadsheet and even as an electronic diary. An the most popular off office suite is Microsoft Office. But even the least expensive version will cost you just under R1000 (Microsoft Office 2013 Home and Student Edition – 1 User R949.95 on Kalahari.com) and the cheapest business version is R2400.00. Keep in mind, that the software licence will only allow you to load it on one PC, so if you have two PCs, you must buy two copies. Then you have the fact that you will need to upgrade every few years.

Expensive, especially if you only use it every so often. But, there is a solution that is FREE (your favourite new word!)

The Full article is published here

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## AndyD

> The Full article is published here


There's some issue with the URL you've posted I'm afraid.

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## adrianh

Open Office is da Bomb - Microslosh Word sucks beeeeeeeeeeegtime

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wynn (26-Mar-13)

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## pietpetoors

I have been using Open Office for the past 5 years and do not need Micro$oft Office. Also look at Libre Office, some people recon it is better than Open Office but I have not tested it yet.

I had to get MS Office for my accountant the other day because Pastel forces you to have MS Office otherwise you cannot use all Pastel's functions. Coincidentally Pastel agents also sell MS Office packages, so I wonder how legal it is to force users to use a certain package.

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## adrianh

What is the relationship between MS Office and Pastel?

That is very very naughty of Pastel.

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## pietpetoors

It uses excell to open some reports. If you do not have excell it just cannot open it. When we first got pastel i spent lot of time on the phone with their support and they just said the only way was to install ms office. I tried everything but in the end had to buy office for that machine

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## solweb

> There's some issue with the URL you've posted I'm afraid.


Thanks - fixed link

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## solweb

> I have been using Open Office for the past 5 years and do not need Micro$oft Office. Also look at Libre Office, some people recon it is better than Open Office but I have not tested it yet.
> 
> I had to get MS Office for my accountant the other day because Pastel forces you to have MS Office otherwise you cannot use all Pastel's functions. Coincidentally Pastel agents also sell MS Office packages, so I wonder how legal it is to force users to use a certain package.


This could be fun - especially if you use linux. I use FNB's Instant Accounting and if my account gives me grief - I will replace him with one that does not. It is like SARS and Adobe Reader - it does not work in linux. And if my PC did not come with Windows installed, I would have to join the q outside SARS like every other schmoe to do my taxes.

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## Dave A

> I had to get MS Office for my accountant the other day because Pastel forces you to have MS Office otherwise you cannot use all Pastel's functions.


Interesting point.

With Quickbooks you have the option of exporting to a csv file. The downside of going that route rather than straight to a spreadsheet is you lose the format controls and the smart function imports, but it does give scope for a workaround.

The big dependancy on MS Office to my mind is by default Quickbooks only connects to Outlook when it comes to emailing, but again there are workarounds. By now there may even be a free or cheap plug-in, come to think of it.

Wen itcomes to the blame game, I'm not entirely sure we can point it solely at the accounting package developers. There have been efforts to standardise important protocols across office suite applications. You'll _never*_ guess who has been proving to be the tricky player...

*Take _italics_ as my sarcasm font in this post, please.

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## Chrisjan B

* I give up Dave - please tell.....

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## vieome

> I have been using Open Office for the past 5 years and do not need Micro$oft Office. Also look at Libre Office, some people recon it is better than Open Office but I have not tested it yet.
> 
> I had to get MS Office for my accountant the other day because Pastel forces you to have MS Office otherwise you cannot use all Pastel's functions. Coincidentally Pastel agents also sell MS Office packages, so I wonder how legal it is to force users to use a certain package.


Have you tried exporting the report to HTML and copy and paste into open office?

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## twinscythe12332

> Wen itcomes to the blame game, I'm not entirely sure we can point it solely at the accounting package developers. There have been efforts to standardise important protocols across office suite applications. You'll _never*_ guess who has been proving to be the tricky player...
> 
> *Take _italics_ as my sarcasm font in this post, please.


hahaha, so that's what you were talking about this morning... I don't know why, but I keep thinking "security", if you know what I mean  :Wink: 

@pietpetpoors It differs mainly on style and menu flow as far as I have been able to tell, but I chose it over open office. Still has irritating "some formatting won't work" issues though.

As for the pastel issue, very naughty indeed. There are plenty of open source options out there for excel file creation. Sounds like their support may not be entirely by accident  :Wink:

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## wynn

> As for the pastel issue, very naughty indeed. There are plenty of open source options out there for excel file creation. Sounds like their support may not be entirely by accident


Especially now that more and more people realize that they don't have to buy MSOffice and are using more and more freeware, seems Pastel are trying to create a market so they can sell into it.

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## adrianh

I must be honest, I've never liked Pastel, the interface is very unintuitive. It seems as if the software was written by accountants rather than programmers...maybe that's why they used OLE to do the nitty gritty reporting work.

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## CLIVE-TRIANGLE

> I must be honest, I've never liked Pastel, the interface is very unintuitive. It seems as if the software was written by accountants rather than programmers...maybe that's why they used OLE to do the nitty gritty reporting work.


Back in the day, when it was first developed, accountants marketed the product and had a huge role in it's development. The fact that this came about after AccPacc's Computer Associates pulled out of SA had a lot to do with that. It is no coincidence that the original product was more than similar, right down to the account numbers!

Dave, Quickbooks basically does not work with Windows' Live and Live Mail. It works with Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird and some others. It connects fine to Gmail and Hotmail.

I have a few clients where Thunderbird for example is only used to send qbooks mail, the package is never opened and Live remains their mail client.

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Dave A (30-Mar-13)

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## solweb

Not actually sure what Pastel has to do with my original post about Open Source - but if you want there is a South African Open Source Accounting package that has been around for some time. 

http://www.turbocash.net/

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chris_kzn (09-Apr-13)

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## irneb

Free, could be divided into 3 categories:
The Bad: stuff like addware. These are free programs but come with baggage where they (at best) display adds while using the program. These days the most common examples are free apps for Android / iPhones. But you do get similar on computers too, e.g. Skype / Kindle / the entire Google suite (if free) / Facebook / etc.
The worse: malware, which range from spyware (stealing information about you) all the way through to actual virusses. IMO Google falls just inside the spyware category as they snoop on your emails / documents / searches and then sell this info on to companies who then bombard you with designed spam.The reasonable "Freeware" / "Shareware" - these are usually cut-down / time-limited versions of a proprietary program. It's usually meant as a try-and-test advert to entice the user to buy the full program. Many anti-virusses go this route (e.g. AVG / Avast!). Others include MediaMonkey, XnView, Opera, Winamp, etc. Some of these stray into the adware area though. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_freewareThe better: Open Source. These include stuff like nearly all Linuxes / BSD / FireFox / Open Office / ThunderBird / etc. The main difference of this from the above 2 is that to fall under this category their source code must be freely available to anyone. Thus you generally find that these tend to not be ad-/malware since everyone can look at what's actually going on and knowledgable programmers would then quickly raise a red-flag on such immoral code. Actually Open Source does not definitively mean free, some programs are sold for mainly their support (e.g. RedHat / StarOffice). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source#Lists
Re: Open Office / Libre Office ... they're basically the same thing. LO was created when Oracle bought out Sun microsystems (the creators of Star Office, which had a spinnoff open source project called Open Office - much like Linux Fedora is the free "testing" version of Linux RedHat). It became unclear what Oracle would do to this code as they've started making licensing changes to some other "open source" projects like MySQL (which is arguably the most used database on the internet).

So after a lot of Sun employees were retrenched due to the Oracle takeover, some started up the Libre project. As far as I can tell, LO is basically just adding some extra plugins by default and rearranging the menu/toolbars a bit. Actually because of this I prefer LO, since most of those addons are things I'd have installed into OOo myself.

As for Open Source in general: There's good and bad as per everything else. In theory OS can provide for much better programs than proprietary programs can. The theory goes that because all the source is open to everyone to view / edit, bugs can be found much more easily, other already written code can be used and thus speed up the production process, and since OS means all programmers throughout the world could contribute the possible bandwidth of code writing is always going to be a lot more than any single company (even a behemouth like MS).

The downsides of this:

Open Source is not foremost meant as a "free" alternative. It's meant as a collaborative effort to produce better programs. You do get users who simply use it for free (as most do), but they contribute very little to the Open Source idea. And by contributing I don't just mean donations / bounties, but even testing betas and / or filing bug reports could help the project. Best would be if you could code yourself and contribute some extra functionality / bug fix, but obviously not all of us can do such.Due to the format of open source, it's supposed to be community driven. But more often than not a democratic system doesn't prevail as it becomes more of a burocratic committee driven project. This tends to slow down the innovation inside the project drastically (e.g. redesign of Open Office / Libre Office's user interface has been in the planning stage for several years now with very little actually being accomplished).Connotations of "free" in the general public equates to "near-useless", so most never even consider it. Thus open source tends to have a difficult time in becoming a mainstream program. Perhaps the most effective example is FireFox. The least IMO is Gimp - most CG artists "feel" that PhotoShop is simply a much better program (even though it costs around R7000 to R12000), but near to 99% of all of them never use the features which are available in PS but not in Gimp.For Open Source to succeed it needs a huge user base to engender interest from contributing programmers to further the program. Also a huge user base causes bugs to be found much more quickly and feature requests to be more prevalent - thus making th program better quicker.

Thus I've found that as a rule of thumb, programs which cater for a great many users (such as operating systems, office suites, web browsers, and to a lesser extent email clients) tend to have Open Source alternatives at least comparable to their proprietary counterparts. In some cases the "free" open source version is actually better than the proprietary one (IMO like Libre Office vs MS Office, and Thunderbird vs Outlook). But where the user base is limited the programs available are less than stellar (e.g. LibreCAD vs AutoCAD).

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chris_kzn (09-Apr-13)

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## Upstairs

I started using ubuntu and libre office. I have no interest to move back to Microsoft. Just have to figure out how to make a Vodacom dongle work in linux...

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## Upstairs

Have a look at this if you are a linux user and using pastel. I have no clue about accounting but perhaps this could be a solution. https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ub...il/010299.html

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## Upstairs

For those of you who struggle with a 3G dongle on linux this may help. http://digitalgotcha.blogspot.com/20...wei-k3770.html

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## irneb

> Just have to figure out how to make a Vodacom dongle work in linux...


I've actually got some strange experience with internet connections: A few years ago (around 5 or 6) I was using my Nokia E65 as my internet connection. On windows I had to install the drivers, on Ubuntu it didn't need any drivers - plugged it in and Ubuntu recognized an internet connect device, no settings whatsoever (just click the connect message and it was done).

Now with an Android phone it's not working on either Windows/Linux through the USB cable. Have to install drivers in both cases. Fortunately though the Android does come with a Wi-Fi-HotSpot, but you need to plug it into charge otherwise the battery dies within an hour while the WiFi is running.

Do you know the true make/model of that Vodacom Dongle? It's usually some Hauwei device. I know Hauwei E220 works on Debian with some tweaks. Basically it seems you have to tell Linux not to tread it as a mass storage device, then it starts to recognise it as a communications device instead.

If your dongle is the new K4305, then from the original branders (VodaFone) the manual actually lists Ubuntu as one of the supported OS's: http://www.business.vodafone.com/sit...stick_2row.jsp

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## chris_kzn

Just wanted to mention, a good 3D free application for all you interior decorators and construction developers is a package called sketchup which is available at http://www.sketchup.com/intl/en/download/index.html

Even a non-constructional person like myself can use it and they have training videos available for download in order to get you started.

With regards to the 3G modem problem, I am experiencing the same on Debian but I know it is because Debian is seeing my modem as a USB-Storage device rather than as a COM's device. That is why I prefer Slackware - lol. I know this problem existed in Windows Vista as well and you had to remove and uninstall the picked up device before it would configure it as a modem. Was quite a painful experience.

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## irneb

> With regards to the 3G modem problem, I am experiencing the same on Debian but I know it is because Debian is seeing my modem as a USB-Storage device rather than as a COM's device. That is why I prefer Slackware - lol. I know this problem existed in Windows Vista as well and you had to remove and uninstall the picked up device before it would configure it as a modem. Was quite a painful experience.


Yes, the link in my previous post as well as that in Upstairs's post show how to disengage the storage device so the comms device can be used.
As for SketchUp, I know of it, used it before - in some respects I find it easier to model in it than most other 3D creation programs (though these days I'm using Revit at work - around R45k per license!!!!  :Slap: ). It used to be something which Google had bought from another company. They've since sold it. There's a free version with decent capabilities, but the paid-for version does provide more. Unfortunately though, it's only available on Windows. For those looking for a decent CAD for free, try something like nanoCAD - unfortunately also only on Windows. The only CAD I know which is even approaching decent on Linux is BricsCAD, though it's not free (a lot cheaper than AutoCAD around 1/10th the price, and about the same capabilities as a 2008 version of ACad, uses the same file format as a 2013 version).

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