If you google those words, there are several hits, but I am always afraid to download software from unknown sources. Can anyone recommend a free replacement that is known good?
As a matter of fact, all I want is a reader that works. I used to use Wordpad for the purpose, but the version that comes with Vista (which I am, alas, stuck with) does not seem to be able to deal with word files. Although I hesitate to ascribe to evil intent that which can be ascribed to stupidity, I wonder whether MS is doing this on purpose. In any case, I don’t propose to actually use this program to create text; I just want to be able to read what people who are too lazy to send me a text file write to me. I see no reason to spend $500 just to accomodate them.
If you only want to read the files without editing them at all then Microsoft make a free Word Viewer. If you need to be able to read Word 2007 files then you’ll need to download the compatibility pack, which is also downloadable from the same page.
I’d like to second Open Office. It’s an unbelievably great FREE clone of Microsoft Office. I’m not a particularly sophisticated user, but it certainly does everything I need for Word, Excel and Powerpoint. The database is also intriguing and I’m screwing around with it as a quick and dirty personal database solution.
I’m adding my vote for Open Office. I’ve been using it for more than a year – both the word processor and the Excel-compatible spreadsheet (Open Office Calc) and have found no drawbacks. They have all the features of Microsoft Word and Excell and are free.
However, if you are a power user like I am, you will find that the spreadsheet in Openoffice is so damn slow. If you any large datasets, like around 10,000 rows and want to manipulate them with macros, stick with Microsoft Excel. I don’t know why they did not optimize Calc to handle large datasets. Also, you can’t run Microsoft Office macros in Openoffice, which is a bitch because that means you have to rewrite all that code.
I use Openoffice and Microsoft Office 2007 concurrently and I can definitely say that I prefer Office 2007 because it handles large datasets faster and the ribbon interface is very intuitive. Microsoft has done a bang-up job with Office 2007. Bravo.
If you need to handle truely large datasets you should get the hell away from Excel entirely and use a software code that is designed to handle data efficiently, like Matlab (commercial) or Scilab (free).
I say this as an engineer who is tired of getting massive datasets in Excel format and having to wait five minutes just for the damn thing to load up on a high end personal workstation. Just give me text data and let me bring it in and work it how I see fit.
There are times, I swear, that it was all so much easier when you had to write C or shell scripts; at least you didn’t have to carry around a bunch of useless formatting metadata.
Thanks for this. I downloaded both OpenOffice Writer and Calc on my home PC the day this thread was active, but put off using them for documents brought home from my work computer until yesterday because dreading the adjustments needed, thinking it would be like transferring from Excel into Google Docs (slow with tweaking necessary).
Taking an Excel spreadsheet home from work yesterday, I was surprised to see it appear in OpenOffice Calc automatically – quickly and perfect down to the last font, color, number of Sheets – no copying-and-pasting. What a pleasure – a full-featured spreadsheet application, free.
I did not click on OpenOffice Calc at all, just the Excel spreadsheet to open it. It appeared in Calc automatically. I’m assuming now it’ll be the same with Word documents opening in OpenOffice Writer. Thanks again.
Microsoft Windows will associate a particular file extension with a particular application. You can change the default application by right clicking on a particular file such as a Word (.doc) file, choosing “properties” and changing the default application. It is interesting to note that Microsoft is prejudiced against OpenOffice and does not show it as an option to open .doc files. You have to choose OpenOffice.org out of the “Open with” programs.
Mine offers the choice of OpenOffice in both the “Open with” menu and in “Properties > Change default” (at bottom of that same menu). Maybe when I downloaded OpenOffice I checked some checkbox that made OO my default for everything, because it does seem to be that.
Monty, apparently I do already have the whole OO 2.3 suite: Base, Math, Calc, Draw, Impress, and Writer. I’m glad you mentioned the suite, though, because I wasn’t aware, or forgot, those other four downloaded in addtion to the word processor (Writer) and spreadsheet (Calc). I look forward to looking into those other four as well. Thanks for the heads-up. I’ve put shortcuts on my desktop to all of them now.
seconded.
It works almost as well as word, but does have a different interface. It is a well done program and I use it every day on a Linux box. If you are looking for an alternative to Word, this is the best I know of.
Open Office still takes ages to load on any system I’ve tried it on (even accounting for the pre-load options). And it has its own look, ignoring system wide settings such as fonts.
Just a note- don’t forget to save your files in OpenOffice as Word documents if you ever need to open them on another machine, because Word won’t open the OpenOffice files. I’ve been screwed over before with this.
True. I’m a StarOffice user, since SO 5, and I had an extensive set of macros to create charts automatically out of spreadsheet data. Slow, slow, slow. I rewrote everything in Perl, and it is much more flexible.
OO has improved tremendously. Most of the incompatibilities with PowerPoint have been eliminated, and change tracking is compatible with Word now.