Programs for working with office documents: an overview

Today it is simply impossible to imagine work with documents of any direction and complexity without the use of computer information processing tools. The era of typewriters is a thing of the past. In most cases, if you do not take specific information or calculations, you need to process the texts. Consider the most popular and common free programs for working with documents of some types. Separately, we will focus on the test files.

Programs for working with documents: general overview

As is known, for the most part, users of computer systems based on Windows prefer to work with the standard package of MS Office applications, in which the programs are presented almost for all occasions.

However, at present, you can find a lot of alternative development, which also includes programs for working with documents of any type, which in their functionality are not inferior to the package of MS Office, and in some cases even surpass it.

In any package, regardless of the developer, there are applications that allow you to create, view and edit text files, spreadsheets, databases, and also process graphic objects or even multimedia.

Office suite from Microsoft

First, let's look at the well-known office suite from Microsoft. It is considered universal, since programs for processing documents used in business are presented here most widely.

Not surprisingly, many developers did not reinvent the wheel and simply copied most of the applications by including their counterparts in their own packages. MS Office itself contains several main applications, among which Word, Excel and Access are most often used.

Speaking specifically about text documents, Word is the progenitor of the DOC / DOCX format, which is now supported by almost all third-party packages. However, the developers of this software product also did not stay aloof and eventually implemented in their editor the ability to work with those different from the standard formats, which by default are used by other developers.

After all, if you look at, for example, the possibility of opening or saving a text document, you can even find support for PDF files here. But more about this later.

Actually, Office itself can be downloaded and installed for free, the only thing you need is the product activation key. This does not stop anyone, because it can be done with a small utility called KMS Activator. In other free packages, there is no such mandatory activation or registration requirement.

Alternative developments

At the dawn of the development of office programs, MS Office took a leading position, as its creators were able to include in a single set of programs for working with documents of completely different types, which allowed to create a tool for working with them, as they say now, the standard "all-in-one ".

Nevertheless, too long to keep the lead was impossible, because the market appeared quite serious competitors. At first, the package became Lotus Pro, and a little later there was another serious development called Open Office. By the way, many experts call this package not only a direct competitor to Microsoft, but also draw the attention of users to the fact that it has some additional tools that MS Office does not have.

The simplest text editors

But let's stop on the text files, which are the most widespread in the workflow today. To view and edit text information, you can use the simplest, as many seem, applications like "Notepad", included in the standard Windows set. Yes, indeed, in "Notepad" you can only work with text, like the way it was in Norton Commander for DOS-systems. Here everything is almost the same, only "Notepad" has a graphical shell. Needless to say, no text formatting, design or insertion of additional objects can not be said.

But very few people know that it is Notepad and programs for working with text-type documents like it that support the syntax of most programming languages known today, so programmers and application developers prefer to work with such editors.

Standard programs for working with Word documents

Now a few words about the text editor Word and its analogues. Consider an example where a user on the computer has a "clean" system. If anyone does not know the office suite is not included in the original Windows set, it should be installed separately. Therefore, many do not even realize that the system has a free program for working with Word documents (it is "sewn" into the system).

This is a WordPad application (Viewer). It can open and view Word files, but there are no special features to edit the document. Uncomfortable, of course, but better than nothing.

However, in the absence of Word, you can open such a text file in another way. This will help Adobe Reader, Acrobat or Acrobat Reader. Any such program for working with text documents containing graphics, allows you to open files of almost any text format or import their contents. Depending on the type of application, the editing capabilities also vary, but even if there is no such tool, you can view the files anyway.

Conclusion

Of course, to consider all applications of office type is simply impossible. However, even with regard to Word documents or text files, it can be noted that working with them can be quite simple. If you really do not have anything at hand, you can view these types of files even with the most common web browsers, not to mention saving them with the ability to edit in cloud services. By the way, many of them allow simultaneous changes that are automatically displayed for all users currently connected to the remote editor on the server.