Having just retired, I bought a new laptop so I can begin using the local wi-fi connections for net access. The machine came with the free 60 day trial version of MS Office.
I’ve used Offcie for years and I’m comforable with it.
But the cost is quite high. What alternatives are there for a versatile and free word processor and a versatile and free spreadsheet programs?
Thanks for your input!
The only alternative I know off is openoffice. Not suitable for business/professional use however, IMHO.
Have you tried Office 2007 Home & Student Version? I got a copy for $100 at a local computer supply fair. It comes with Word, Excel, and Powerpoint.
Well for free there’s Open Office which is a completely free open-source office suite. To be honest, I don’t get on all that well with it - for basic things it’s fine, but when I try to do anything a little complicated I end up getting frustrated. Now, that may be just because it’s not the same as MS Office and I don’t have the patience to learn.
When you say MS Office is a bit pricey, are you including the Home and Student Edition that’s around $99? That includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. It’s double the price here in the UK and I still think it’s well worth it. YMMV, though.
*Edit - Too slow! Shoulda previewed! :smack: *
You had to know someone was going to ask why you’d say that, and here it is: why do you say that?
It lacks compatibility features, It’s different enough that some complicated things become a real pain or are just plain not possible to accomplish. Forget about running complex macros from office as well.
Home and student verison of MS Office also includes MS Outlook, at least here in the US.
The main issue with OpenOffice are that it mangles anything complicated that was created in MS Office.
Not true. I use StarOffice (the supported version of OO) all the time, and when writing papers and producing presentations for conferences I switch back and forth between SO and Office, mostly to check my stuff that is being sent out in Office format. Older versions did have compatibility versions, but there are very few in the most recent ones. My latest paper includes equations, tables, and figures, all of which worked fine. Tracking changes works also - I use that all the time when sending stuff to my editor.
Macros are the one thing that doesn’t work. I did use OO macros extensively a few years back, but haven’t recently.
For someone who has just retired, OO is a great choices, and probably easier to convert to than Office 2007 from the older versions.
There’s LaTeX if you’re a masochist. It produces the best looking documents out of all of the choices, though.
Actually, there’s a word processor built on top of LaTeX called LyX, thinking about it.
And this is available to download for free as part of Google Pack.
I’ve been using OpenOffice exclusively for about 3 years now. The vast majority of documents I produce are functional and technical spec documents ranging from anywhere to 20 to 100 pages. These include graphics, charts, TOCs, linked bibliographies, all the swish auto-formatting, etc. I’ve also written several large financial OpEx and CapEx spreadsheets using the OpenOffice spreadsheet app (10+ tabs, lot’s of cross-linking, graphs, and heavy formulas). All of these I’ve been able to save to .doc and .xls formats and clients have been able to open them with no problem. I can’t think of the last time I couldn’t do something in OO that I would have been able to do in MS Office. I will admit that it is a bit harder going from complex MS docs to OO docs, and manual reformatting is required.
On the other hand, the OO presentation (PowerPoint equivalent) and drawing (Visio equivalent) apps are a pile of poo. But word processor and spreadsheet work very well.
Just remember when you start to use it that you didn’t learn all of Word and Excel’s features in a day, or even a month. Things are laid out differently in OO, but I guarantee you the main functional components are all there. Google is your friend… and there is a very active OpenOffice community online as well to handle any questions. I feel that is most people’s complaint about OpenOffice now… it’s just different than what they are comfortable with. And sometimes change is painful, but that is not because of the tool.
Thanks for the replies. I’ll check out the alternatives.