RightNote – A $15 replacement for Word and Excel?

Now, Word and Excel are extremely large and extremely powerful programs, but to be honest, people use maybe 5% of the features, if that. You literally end up paying and arm and a leg for a piece of software that does more than you will ever need. Most of us make up a quick document with a couple or bold items, a few bullet points and maybe a heading or two. In Excel, it’s a couple of columns, most likely some sort of budget and that’s it. We aren’t doing desktop publishing, nor are we setting up an account ledger, so why pay for all that nonsense? But here is a neat alternative – RightNote.

The RightNote editor has all the basic features of Word and Excel built right in. You can create a formatted document with the standard bold, italic and underline, along with headers and styles as well as inserting a table if you need it. Then there is the Spreadsheet note that lets you use the old tried and true Excel function such as =SUM(), but you get dozens more such as Average, If, Date, Concatenate, CountIf, SumIf, Weekday, Text and lots of others. So that would clearly cover what most people would use Word and Excel for. And that’s all within one application that’s a fraction of the size.

You can save your documents as Word 2007 .docx files, but there isn’t an option to export out a spreadsheet. That would be a problem is you’re working with real spreadsheets all the time and need to send them off for review, but I doubt it would be that big of a deal for the average home user. When was the last time you imported or send a spreadsheet for home use?

I have to say, RightNote is looking pretty sweet and goes way beyond just some simple note taking tool. With the current sale, I grabbed the Professional version for $30 which I think is a great deal for all the powers and features, but it would be just as feasible to grab the Standard version, which doesn’t include some of the web clipping features, and you would still get the most useful features of Word and Excel for $15. That is pretty hard to argue.