2. Microsoft Office
Most people have used Microsoft Office before, but is it really a necessary tool anymore? Many people have suffered at the hands of businesses and schools that don't upgrade, thus leaving them bewildered and confused when they buy a computer and cannot find the features they take for granted. Not many people have realised that it doesn't actually have to be this way. Office 2010 and older came in several flavours: Student, Home or Professional. The difference was the price, and the programs available. And it worked well like that. For most people, it came pre-installed onto their home or office computer. They learned the ways of the current office version, and were happy with it. Then, a new version would come out. Technologically savvy users would get excited over new features, while most people would gripe and groan "I just want my file menu back" "Where have my features gone?" "Why can't I open this file" etc etc. But then with Office 2013, Microsoft threw a curveball. As well as just offering the standard package for $220 (as of writing) Microsoft also offered the $9.99 a month or $90 a year subscription. This is an awesome idea, considering you only really want to use it for a little while before you update to the new version, and now people can justify doing that without it costing a large sum of money. But why did Microsoft offer this? Could it be because there are far cheaper (or free) alternatives to the very expensive Microsoft Office? "But they don't have as many features!" How many features do you need to justify that price? For a lot of people, Word is the only program used on a regular basis. And the majority of the features used are formatting: bold font, underline, different font sizes etc. Why not, in this case, use Google Drive, or LibreOffice? Google Drive is a very feature filled Officesuite, and more than fulfils the role of Word or Excel for most users. It also has the added bonus of everything being automatically saved to "the cloud" and is accessible on any computer, phone or tablet with an internet connection. "What if I don't always have an internet connection?" They've allowed Chrome users, whether the browser or the OS, to have all documents automatically saved to your computer, thus making them offline. It's also possible to access the website drive.google.com offline in Chrome, giving you access to your Officesuite wherever, whenever. Meanwhile LibreOffice is the only other suite I've had any experience with, and while there was a noticeable difference between Word and Writer, it did the job for the most part. Both suites work with docx files, allowing you to remain up to date with other Word users around you. Contenders: LibreOffice, Google Drive