Free Alternatives to Microsoft Office - Part 1: Google Apps

When we first started Rapid Intake in 2000, it was necessary to buy a license of Microsoft Office. So I shelled out the $300 back then to get a used copy off of eBay. There just weren't many alternatives that people were using and it was an important piece of software to have getting started.

If you're starting a business now, don't spend a dime on Microsoft Office unless you know that you need some of its specific features that aren't available in the free alternatives. Now before you think I'm a raving anti-Microsoft anarchist, I want to say that the money spent on Microsoft Office has been well worth it. We used it to self-publish four books on e-learning course development, among thousands of other smaller tasks. I get as angry about Windows as anyone, but MS Office has undoubtedly helped millions of companies be more productive in ways they wouldn't have been otherwise.

However, if you're starting a business today, there are at least three free alternatives you should look at, and experiment with, before deciding to pay for MS Office. I'm going to discuss each in a separate blog post. Let's start with Google Apps.

Google Apps
Free online software that has solid core functionality for:

• Email (a version of the popular Gmail email application that is a much better solution in almost every way than MS Outlook, and you can get it with your own business domain)
  
• Documents (many fewer features than MS Word, but it works, it's free, and you can export to MS Word if you need to)
• Spreadsheets (again, many fewer features than MS Excel, but still a solid spreadsheet that will meet most small business needs)
• Websites (called 'Sites' in Google, you can build your own sites, collaborative wiki style)
  
• Calendars (this is one of the best features because it makes calendar sharing and setting appointments with others so easy...just try getting MS Exchange set up properly and you'll see how easy Google makes it for you)
• Live Chat (this is integrated into your email or can be used as a desktop app and even includes excellent voice and video chat)

While the FREE aspect is, of course, attractive, the best thing about all of Google App's free tools is that it is all online. Why go online with software? Access from anywhere, access with mobile devices, and most importantly, it opens collaborative opportunities. No need to have a network drive to post your documents and spreadsheets on--simply create them in Google Apps. Everyone on your team can access them, update them, and you can even share them with customers or other external team members. You get complete control over access privileges.

You can also use your own domain for your email, websites, and more. For example, my garinhess@rapidintake.com email address is actually a Google Mail address.

At Rapid Intake, we still use MS Office for some things, but if I had to start over, I would start with Google Apps and try to avoid getting Office altogether. We've long since migrated our email permanently from MS Outlook, and we'll never go back.

Google Apps starts charging for businesses that have more than 25 employees, but that's a lot of growing room for small businesses just starting out. That growing room, combined with its online collaborative features make it get my number one vote for Smart Small Business Technology as an MS Office replacement.

In subsequent posts on this topic, I'll be addressing two other nice alternatives, OpenOffice, a desktop alternative, and another newer set of online applications from Adobe's Acrobat.com.

Post Office from Anywhere: Send a Letter or PDF via Mail to Anywhere From Anywhere with MailALetter.com

I found myself at a tradeshow the other day hoping that I could quickly mail a sales data sheet to a prospect. But I really didn't want to have to go to the business center at the hotel, print the data sheet and have it mailed. I thought, "There should be a way to just upload a PDF, write a letter online, and have a service mail it for me without having to leave my desk."

So, I started searching. 

One thing I love about today's world is that usually, when you have a good idea because of a need you encounter, you can search for it and ta-dah, someone is already offering that service. That was the case here. I

 found a couple of services that I tried out, L-Mail.com and MailALetter.com.

I found both very easy to use. At the time I tried it out, L-Mail didn't offer the option to upload a PDF. The main reason I wanted to mail a PDF was so that I could write a letter on "my letterhead" along with "my signature" (scanned in) and have it accompany my sales data sheet.

I found the best option with MailALetter. MailALetter charges only $0.99 (USD) to print and mail a letter. That's only one page, but additional pages are only $0.25 and that includes color printing. 

MailALetter also lets you upload a PDF, which I found essential for business technology.

Of course, before I was going to try it on a prospect, I wanted to make sure it was going to work and work well.

I tried it out by sending myself a sales data sheet. Creating the account and uploading the PDF was painless. A few days later I received this in my PO Box:

The return address has the "www.mailaletter.com" line, so I emailed them asking if they could replace the return address with a return address logo block of my choosing. They said yes.

There is no way to do this in your account on MailALetter (at the time I reviewed it), but the support response was prompt and they said I just needed to email it to them and they would add it to my account.

I haven't actually tried that yet, but it's reassuring to know that anywhere I am I can post a letter virtually, even internationally (it's $2 for an international letter).

Gmail TIP: Getting HTML and Images into a Gmail Signature

Here's a quick tip. To get an image into a Gmail signature (which otherwise seems impossible to do), you build your HTML signature in an HTML editor (like Dreamweaver) then preview it in the browser.

1. Create your signature in HTML making sure any images are already hosted on the Internet somewhere (e.g. Flickr)
   
2. Upload the HTML page to a web server
3. Preview that page in a browser
4. Copy what you see and paste it into gmail--you'll be surprised to see that it pastes everything in, including images!

Interestingly, once you have an image pasted into gmail, gmail does give you options to resize and so on. So they obviously included the ability to work with images...you just can insert them without this copy and paste business.

It's a pain to copy and paste each time, but when it's part of your routine, it doesn't take that long and adds a lot to the signature line. Why Google doesn't allow this feature in the built-in signature setting I don't know. They should. Other programs have been doing this for years, but I'd gladly copy and paste the signature in exchange for the other great features that gmail has to offer.

Here's an example of my signature that I created because our company, Rapid Intake, just won a significant award in our industry and I want to use the signature line to help spread the good news.

I hope you enjoy this tip.

Here's my signature as an example:

Garin Hess | CEO
Rapid Intake
www.rapidintake.com
Email: garinhess@rapidintake.com


-- Open eLearning for Everyone™

iPhone + Online Spreadsheets - EditGrid, I'm in Love

I recently ditched my Samsung Windows Mobile 6 phone for an iPhone after coveting my iPhone-toting peers for months.

One of the things I knew I would give up is the ability to edit spreadsheets since the iPhone doesn't support MS Excel and you can't edit Google App spreadsheets with the iPhone (though the preview does work nicely).

So, this morning I found a very nice solution in the form of EditGrid (www.editgrid.com), a nicely designed collaborative spreadsheet solution. EditGrid recently released an iPhone beta version of their online spreadsheet application.

This is not an iPhone app, to be clear. It is just an iPhone optimized version of their application still running from their server. This means that I can:

• convert Excel spreadsheets and work with them online
  
• collaborate with others
• AND, view and edit the spreadsheets from my iPhone

Ah, true spreadsheet love.

All of the euphoria aside, the spreadsheets do load pretty slowly but EditGrid is working on that. And of course, editing spreadsheets on a 3.5" screen has never been a lovely proposition. Still, the fact I can view and edit them from anywhere, even from my phone, is a big plus.

Why Smart Business Technology? Creating Time and Profits

As an entrepreneur, and the founder of a technology company, I am constantly on the look for innovative ways to improve internal processes, do more with less, and thereby create time for more productive or simply to have more time with my family.

Many of these tips and processes have arisen out of a difficult situations. Having to let people go due to an economic downturn or other reason often forces us to go back to the drawing board and evaluate how we could do things better, faster, more efficiently, because we just don't have the luxury of lots of resources.

These tips are the little things that make a big difference. They can mean having to hire or not hire someone (try not to hire if you can). They can mean spending time playing tennis with your son or spending more time at the office.

By using innovative technology (much of it free or very inexpensive), you can do so much more, and often more effectively, than you could without it. And I'm not just talking smart phones.

Using technology to create time and profits isn't just about choosing and using the right technology, it's also about avoiding pitfalls. So in this blog I'll detail some of the lessons learned about choosing the incorrect technology solutions in my experience.

I'm passionate about entrepreneurship and I hope that what I share here will in some measure be useful to you in your efforts to build and manage your business effectively.