My SO needs to print up some labels, and it would be nice to make some signs as she’s looking to sell some of her art stuff in the near future.
My netbook came w/ a 60 day free trial of MS Office. I took like 2 high school courses and 2 college courses using MS Office, so I’m very familiar w/ the layout and everything it can do. The thing is, I only need to create some signs, lists, and other simple stuff that requires basic color/fonts/formats.
I don’t want to waste my 60 day trial for doing maybe 2-3 hours of work, then let it sit idle for the next 59’ish days. I was wondering if anyone created even a minor competitor to MS Word. I know there was news a while ago about Google trying to nudge into this market w/ a free word processor, but I don’t think that’s hit the market yet.
I use Open Office. It works pretty well. It has some annoying buggy aspects, and has fewer features than Word, but if you don’t want to do anything fancy, it’s fine. And it’s free.
OpenOffice would be my default suggestion as well – it’s an entire free office suite – unless something about it in particular bugs you.
If you don’t mind working online, there’s also Zoho, which is much better than Google Docs.
But IMO nothing beats Microsoft Office in terms of features and ease-of-use (never thought I’d say that). If you still have your college email, consider getting Office 2007 Ultimate for $60.
Thanks guys, I’ll definately give Open Office a look tomorrow (it’s getting a little late here now.). Sadly, I think the last word processor I used before MS Word was Microsoft Works, back around the late nineties or so. I’m hoping Open Office is at least a little similar, so I don’t look like a lost little PC user trying to navigate a Mac for the first time.
I’m not looking for anything crazy, some Tabs I can set, fonts/colors are all I’m looking for mainly. If it can import ClipArt/Images, all the better.
I don’t use Open Office but have it installed at work and at home because I have discovered that often when things go wrong with MS Word or MS Excel files they can be recovered by opening them in Open Office, resaving them and then opening again in the MS application.
From the little I have done in the application it appears to have more than enough functionality for the average user.
The best place to find free software of any description is Gizmo’s Reviews (bookmark this). Here is their take on Office suites and here is a minimalist word processor replacement.
Oh yeah, it can do that stuff fine. When I said “annoying buggy aspects”, I was basically referring to its habit of trying to automatically number things for me when I am making lists. It really, really, REALLY wants me to number items in a specific way, and it can be very difficult to get it to understand that I may want to arrange my points in a different manner. It’s super frustrating. I’ll delete a number and then hit “enter” and it’ll put the number right back in.
Other than that, I have no complaints. And I have to write a lot of papers (I’m a student) so I use it pretty much constantly.
This is the Google Docs that Reply mentioned. For what you want to do it’s more than adequate, and you don’t have to download or install anything - just go to docs.google.com and start editing.
I would like to add that Open Office’s user interface is more like the Word 2003 and older version of Microsoft word, then MS Word 2007. Word 2007 introduced the “ribbon” interface, replacing the standard menu bar at top. I don’t know why MS made this change; everyone I have talked to about this hates the ribbon.
I will also endorse OpenOffice. It is quite powerful and has all the word processing features you need.
I’d also like to second don’t ask’s suggestion to check out Gizmo’s Freeware Reviews. Not just because I am an editor on that site , but also because the reviews are quite extensive and done by real people who have exhaustively checked out the software they recommend.
So Open Office is completely compatible with MS Word documents?
I am currently using the free trial of MS Office 2007 that came with my PC, but it really sucks big time. It took me 15 minutes to figure out where my print preview option was.
I have heard good things about Open Office before but was never sure if I could open MS documents in it or if others with MS would be able to open my documents created with Open Office.
I had planned on downloading MS 2003 onto this new PC (husband has a copy I always use on any new pc) but I may just go ahead and try out Open Office.
Yes. When you save a document in Open Office, it gives you a lot of different formats to save it as, and several of them are different versions of MS Word. Like I said, I’m a student, and I very often have to submit papers electronically. My professors usually specify that they want them as Word documents, and I’ve never had any trouble doing that with Open Office.
At work I use neither a PC or a Mac, so we use Star Office (the supported version of Open Office) for everything. Version 9 doesn’t read docx files yet, but you can save it as a regular doc file and it will work fine.
The user interface is a lot closer to Works than the Word 2007 one is.
Almost all the issues come from Impress, the OO version of Powerpoint, and that is far better now than it used to be. The biggest problem I have is if I embed a spreadsheet from one application or another into a document - it then becomes impossible to edit, though I haven’t checked lately. Same for drawings. But for relatively simple jobs, there will be no issue.
I write a column in Star Office which comes back from the editor with track changes on, and that feature works fine for both tools.
I got Open Office about fifteen months ago, I don’t know if they’ve come up with a new version since then, but Impress is pretty lame and isn’t nearly as user friendly as actual PowerPoint. When I have to make a presentation, I use the school computers, which have PowerPoint.
Not completely, no, but 90% there. Most of the time it’ll be fine. If you’re turning in an important paper or job document, though, either submit it as PDF (if allowed) or use the free Microsoft Word Viewer to make sure the output is acceptable.
Believe me, 9/10 times the OpenOffice output will be just fine, but you DON’T want to get complacent and let that 1/10 fuck you over by making you look unprofessional. Check every important document.
That is my only annoyance with O.O. It makes me crazy, but I don’t do lists enough to try to figure out how to stop it.
I find it doesn’t do it well either, like if my 1) goes long, it doesn’t indent and line up under the 1, but on the left margin. And mine never numbers past 11.
I was gonna let the thread die… but I see it’s on the front page still so I’ll chime back in.
Open Office seems to be working great, the interface is very familiar to the MS Office I know so well. The first time I ran it, it was a little slow on my 1.6 Ghz netbook, but the second time it seemed to run ok. My only complaint is the ~150 Meg download, that took about an hour on my weakly connected DSL wireless connection.
But it definately blows Wordpad out of the f’ing water. Thanks all for the replies
, but also because the reviews are quite extensive and done by real people who have exhaustively checked out the software they recommend.