In computing, an office suite, sometimes called an office software suite or productivity suite is a software suite intended to be used by typical clerical worker and knowledge workers. The components are generally distributed together, have a consistent user interface and usually can interact with each other, sometimes in ways that the operating system would not normally allow. There is currently a trend towards online office suites which are web applications rather than traditional software.

Platform

A distinction should be made between offline (e.g. Microsoft Office and Star Office), hybrid (e.g. Microsoft Office Live Workspace) and online (e.g. Thinkfree Office, Google Docs and Zoho Office Suite) versions of office suites. The later two can, however, also be used offline with Gears.

Typical components

• Word processor
• Spreadsheet
• Presentation program
• Database
• Graphics suite
• Communication
• Email client
• Personal information manager
• Groupware
• Web log analysis software

Current suites

The currently dominant office suite is Microsoft Office, which is available for Microsoft Windows and Apple Inc.'s Mac OS X. It has become a proprietary de-facto standard in office software.

An alternative to Microsoft office is Kingsoft Office with the same look and feel the same Microsoft including supporting many of the features of Microsoft Office. Kingsoft Office is available for Windows. Other alternatives are any of the OpenDocument suites, which use the free OpenDocument file format, defined by ISO/IEC 26300. The most prominent of these is OpenOffice.org Fact: date=May 2007, open-source software that is available for Windows, Linux, Macintosh, and other platforms, and has spawned several derivatives such as the Mac-native NeoOffice. Other free or less-expensive office suites include StarOffice, KOffice, Celframe Office, and Lotus Symphony. These programs support many of the features of Microsoft Office, can open the files it creates, and can save new documents in its formats.

Apple has also released a full office suite called iWork which consists of a document/layout program (Pages), a spreadsheet program (Numbers), and a presentation program (Keynote). This suite is currently Mac-only and costs $79.99.

A category of "online word processors" allows editing of centrally-stored documents using a web browser. The best-known example of these is Google Docs.