While there are many other such free alternatives to Microsoft Office, OnlyOffice stands out of the crowd for its additional set of features. Originally named as TeamLab, OnlyOffice has now come up with offers a free version of its software, with a few extra features and an improved customer relationship management system. It allows you to optimize the work between your employees.
OnlyOffice review
Just sign up for the free version of OnlyOffice with your name, email, and other contact details. Once you are done with sign-up, you can create your account name with a custom URL; yourname.onlyoffice.com. Confirm your email address and get started. You can also sign in using your Facebook, Google Plus, Twitter or LinkedIn accounts.
Simple Layout
The software comes with a very simple layout, and the main overview has it all. The left panel shows the features and options available. You can create new documents, check your documents, shared documents, common documents, and the project documents here.
You can create new documents – Click on Create tab, and you can create a spreadsheet, document, folder or presentation. Or, click on the upload button and upload any of your existing documents to OnlyOffice.Check your documents – My Documents tab shows all the documents created or uploaded by you, may it be a document, spreadsheet of a folder. You can edit, share or download your document from this tab.Shared Documents – This tab shows the documents which your colleagues or friends have shared with you or granted access to. Any change in the shared documents is marked NEW.Common Documents – This section shows all the documents shared by the portal administrator for common access. Generally used by an employer with the employees or maybe a project leader with the team-mates. Only the admin here gets the right to create new folders, but the users with granted access can also upload the files here. You can share the documents with your colleagues and give them either read-only access or full access as an admin with the right to edit.Project Documents – This section includes the images and documents uploaded or created for a particular project. You can create new projects under this tab and add your team to it. Furthermore, you can manage your project by adding tasks or milestones. You can also add discussions, documents, and reports to manage it well. Features like Gantt Chart, Time Tracking, and Reports certainly increase productivity.
Online document editors
The tool comprises a good list of document editors with support for almost every format including TXT, PDF, DOC, DOCX, CSV, HTML and more. It provides full-functional editors for spreadsheets, documents or presentations. It further supports the collaborative editing of spreadsheets which helps you optimize the work between your employees. Users can edit their documents right in their browser with downloading or installing any software or tool, no matter which operating system they are using.
Connected accounts
You can link your other cloud accounts to OnlyOffice and view, edit or share all your documents stored in any of those cloud services. Just click on Add Account tab in the left panel of OnlyOffice and add the accounts you want. The software supports Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, Yandex. Disk, SharePoint and many more cloud services.
CRM
OnlyOffice is one of the best CRM software available around which helps you communicate with your clients in a simpler and organized way. It covers a broad set of features required to manage the customer data of a company, interaction with customers, partners’ relationships, sales, invoices, and marketing details, etc. You first need to add your contacts to your account. Click the Document tab in the main ribbon on the top and click on CRM, now click on the small down arrow and import your contacts.
Other useful tools include the Calendar, Chat, People and Community. The Community tab includes blogs, events, forums, birthdays, and bookmarks.
Invite Users
OnlyOffice lets you invite your colleagues to your portal for some document sharing or project collaboration. Click on Invite users to portal tab and you will get a link to add users. Copy and paste the link to invite people to your portal. There is also an option to create new users or a group to share a document with. The software also allows to add users from your Facebook, Google + and Twitter profiles or to upload a .CSV file of contacts from Yahoo or Google.
OnlyOffice Help Center
The software has a great customer support system. Click on the Help Center tab in the left panel, and you can get solutions to all your questions and queries. The tool also includes the direct links of video guides to understanding the features well. Overall, OnlyOffice is a nice, simple, intuitive, and useful cloud business service that contains everything one would look for in a CRM tool. It is a complete Office Suite that enables companies to manage customer relations, projects, and documents in one place. The simple layout makes it usable. OnlyOffice undoubtedly is a nice alternative to Office, as it efficiently opens complex OOXML files (docx, pptx, xlsx) – the most used document format in the world, created by Microsoft.
ONLYOFFICE includes the following features:
ONLYOFFICE has updated its editors and added there are many significant changes:
New in the document editor
Document comparison and merging;New Content controls;Captions for graphic objects.
New in the spreadsheet editor
Custom Sort;Performing actions in the entire workbook or current sheet;Re-calculating formulas.
New in the presentation editor
Adding objects to the slide layout or placeholders;Reset Slide option.
OnlyOffice free download
ONLYOFFICE Personal free web application for co-editing documents is available here. ONLYOFFICE Desktop Editors is a free Office suite to work with documents offline is available here. It is free for personal use only. The source code of OnlyOffice is available on GitHub under the AGPL license so that everyone can use it free of charge for both personal and business use. Since it is a free and Open Source project ONLYOFFICE offers the free self-hosted version of its business solution that includes a set of tools to manage projects, documents, email, client relations, events, etc at onlyoffice.org. The prebuild binaries for its installation on Windows are available on SourceForge. The installation instructions can be found on their website.
