Choice of Office Productivity Tools

My guess is that this is a topic that one tends to take for granted, especially if he/she is used to working in a bigger company, mostly because there are already well-established toolsets and processes in place to conduct business on a daily basis. When it comes to your own startup however, the need for effective productivity cannot be understated – and hence the stress on choosing the right set of tools. What makes this a challenging exercise is the fact that most tools in this space (collectively called the Microsoft Office Suite) will most likely be beyond the budget of a fledgling startup. Few can debate the power of the tools and I still maintain that no other toolset even comes close to comparison yet, but it is an undeniable fact that the price makes it unaffordable for a startup. The last time I checked, an Office Professional license was priced at around Rs. 15k – not only are you not going to be able to afford it, chances are that you are probably not going to need about 70-80% of the functionality that comes at that price point. From our experience, it was pretty clear that we primarily needed Word & Excel, and to a much lesser extent, some Powerpoint. So what options did we explore?

First, we wanted to try and find a cheaper MS Office suite – there was a lot of hype around this subscription-based Microsoft Office SKU that was priced at around Rs. 1500 for a 6-month subscription, and renewable at a lower rate. Still not cheap, but a lot more affordable. The problem? This SKU was about as real as Harry Potter and Hogwarts – despite a thorough search for over 2 months, we were unable to find a single reseller that even knew about this SKU, let alone being able to sell it to us. And we were MSFT alumni, if we had so much trouble locating this edition with our network, I can only imagine how much harder it must have been without that reach. I now believe that this was just yet another feel-good, keep-the-PR-engine-happy initiative that was never meant to see the light of day.

So moving on to some real software that we could actually get our hands on, we tried Openoffice. The best part is that its free. And it has all the basic functionality you’ll need when it comes to documents, spreadsheets, task lists (Writer and Calc instead of Word and Excel) etc. Its free and that shows – its not quite in the same league as MS Office in terms of look, feel, UI etc but you get what you paid for, and it was more than sufficient to get the job done. Interoperability was a challenge and when we had to share documents with folks outside the company, we had to remember to save it in an MS-compliant format (the rest of the world is pretty much on MS Office, it seems like), had issues with formatting across platforms etc. One big unintended benefit with OpenOffice Calc was that it allowed a much simpler, richer data import process into our SQL Server database by allowing simple conversion to the CSV format (comma-delimited) – Excel supports this too but was rather messy with string data, not always consistent with single and double-quotes etc. When it came to creating slide decks and presentations, the gap was a lot more noticeable with Impress, the proposed Powerpoint replacement – not quite as rich, the presentations don’t look good or as professional, which is a big problem especially when its for an external audience. And with Powerpoint 2007, Microsoft has definitely taken it up several notches, so I think the gap has only widened. But overall, Openoffice provides a good, cost-effective alternative.

And then there is Google docs. A very compelling choice, that has certainly added a lot of powerful features over the last several months and is catching up rather nicely with the leader. The big difference is that this is available online only – so while that prevents offline editing and therefore impairs productivity, it also makes collaboration that much easier. There is only one central copy – sharing the document is super easy, allows concurrent editing and collaboration, good integration with gmail and gtalk, and there is no need to forward, store and manage multiple copies locally. We used the Spreadsheet a lot more than we used any of the other tools and particularly for things like task and bug tracking, creating lists etc, this was extremely simple and powerful at the same time. From a features standpoint, there is still a long ways to go however – sharing data across sheets in a book, complicated formulate, filters etc are all features that one would want to use on a regular basis as a heavy spreadsheet user and thats one area where the Google Spreadsheets fall short.

So in short, we ended up using a combination of these tools depending on the task that they were best suited for. But thats an approach that is not the most efficient and certainly doesn’t scale very well as your startup evolves, so in that sense the search for the ideal toolset still continues. Zoho seems to be very promising and fairly extensive, but I haven’t had a chance to play with those yet.

What tools do you use in your environment? If you have any experiences to share in this regard, please comment.