Free-download word processor that can handle Word documents?

Factual Questions
1

Owing to a switch in home computers I no longer have a registered copy of Microsoft Word, and cannot buy a new one, which means I have a large number of Word files in (an auxiliary) memory that I cannot open, view or edit. And I need to create some new ones for a jobhunt.

My brother told me there is a free downloadable product called “Office Works” that is the functional equivalent of Word and can edit Word documents. But the only thing I could find by googling that phrase is a Microsoft program which allows one to read, but not write, Word files. Googling for free-download word processors turns up nothing so far as I can see. Do you know of any?

2

You want OpenOffice. It should do what you need it to.

3

OpenOffice is a free alternative to the office suite, and it should handle MS Office file formats.

http://www.openoffice.org/

4

Open Office

5

That makes it unanimous (so far). :smiley:

6

Out of fear that Open Office will shortly no longer be what it is (thanks to Oracle being the new owner), it’s been forked into LibreOffice to keep it open source and free.

7

There is also Google Docs, which is a web based service you access through your browser (nothing to install) and keeps your files online.

It is much lighter than open office but has the advantage of being accessible from any computer with internet. There is plenty of room to easily store all of your documents. If you have a gmail account you can use the same account for Google docs.

I use both.

8

You might want to check out the Office Web Apps to see if they’d work for you.

9

Have you tried OpenOffice? :smiley:

You might also look into Microsoft Live, an online and (so far) free version of Microsoft Office. It actually works quite well.

10

A while ago, Google stopped the ability to work offline on Google Docs via Gears. Has that functionality been restored?

11

I don’t think so. It was supposed to be replaced using HTML5.

To the OP: Another option is AbiWord. It is lighter-weight than Open Office.

12

Pardon my gignorance, but what does “lighter-weight” mean in this context?

13

Sorry: smaller installation size (hard-disk usage), smaller memory requirements (RAM usage), and less complexity because AbiWord only replaces Word and not the entire office suite.
I should add that I haven’t used AbiWord for a while. I can get by with Google Docs.

14

A real draw back of google docs is poor functionality when connections are bad. There is a linux app that I saw on ubuntu that was supposed to make it usable offline. I had to reinstall at one point and wasnt able to find it again after a small search.

I dont know if the microsoft product gets around this - probably not as they would want you to use MS Office offline I imagine.

15

Another vote for Google Docs. It’s also good if you want to collaborate with other Google Docs users on a single doc.

16

There’s an online suite called Zoho. Here’s more info about the Zoho writer. Apparently it can read Word documents as well as Google docs and others.

17

Is G/D compatible with MS Word, per OP request?

18

Use Microsoft’s ***free ***Office Web Apps

This replaces Microsoft Works and is the Microsoft’s answer that you don’t need any other freeware out there…check it out. There’s a lot of cool stuff in Windows Live 4 beta. All you need is a free passport account.

19

I ran abiword before I switched to Open Office. The version I had would not run .docx files, which was the whole reason I needed something to supplement MS-works that came with the system. Open Office is far better compatibility wise.

I will further extol the greatness of Open Office. Get that.