While the latest incarnation has met with a mixed reaction and more people are opting for Macs and Linux, the time is right to see if you can survive without Microsoft Office. “A new generation of competitors — Google Docs, IBM Lotus Symphony, OpenOffice.org, and Zoho — is emerging from two different directions: cloud computing services and open source software,” Curtis Franklin explains in Can you really live without Microsoft Office? “The feature sets and user interfaces of the competition have developed to a point at which they can be considered serious options for personal productivity tasks.” So it’s plausible to changeover to an Office alternative, Franklin asserts. But how do you go about actually making the switch? Software Development