Preferably something that can open my old Word files.
Have you tried open office?
Open Office is probably the most-recommended one. I can’t vouch for how well you can make Word documents that MS Word users will see with the same formatting, but you can definitely open and work on Word documents in general.
I haven’t used Open Office in a few years, but it did a wonderful job on basic Word Documents. I had some trouble with advanced features in long manuscripts (e.g., automated indexing, page backgrounds, complex tables with merged and nested cells). It runs on most operating systems (Windows, Macintosh, Linux…).
Open Office comes as close to MS as you will find. I have tried all the other popular ones and this seems to be the gold standard of free software. It comes with a suite of other stuff that is quite large. I took the whole package. It words better now than years ago and keeps updating for free. It’s not 100% the same as MS and if you were moving documents back and forth between them, you would see format changes and glitches. If you are just using this one, you won’t have problems.
How about Wordpad?
Another vote for Open Office.
Either Open Office or as a standalone WP, AbiWord
Another vote for OpenOffice.
Opened all my Word docs, even ones with very complex formatting faithfully, the interface is cheekily close to Word’s, and it does a lot of stuff better, like the export to PDF seems bullet-proof.
Just a FYI: OpenOffice is now owned by Oracle and is pretty much circling the drain.
LibreOffice is a what’s called a fork of OpenOffice. Many of the same people who worked on OpenOffice have moved on to LibreOffice, and it’s still the same program, only its free of Oracle’s control.
Says who? Beside it is open source anyone can take it
OpenOffice has always had a goal of being an open substitute for Microsoft Office, but they’ve never really achieved that goal. If you really want to do business stuff, you really do need Microsoft Office (as much as I hate to plug anything from Microsoft).
That said, though, the word processor that comes with OpenOffice is very good, and mostly does everything that Microsoft Word does. There are a few fancy formatting things that it doesn’t handle properly, but for everything that most folks use it works quite well.
OpenOffice is far from circling the drain.
From here:
OpenOffice files Oracle divorce papers
And just for the record, any “swriter” .odt document from Open Office can be saved (in Open Office) as a .doc document (not .docx yet AFAIK) that is quite readable by MS Word (or WordPad TTBOMK).
Err, the very next paragraph from your source says (bolding mine):
A few years ago, I had to do a batch of conversions. At the time, AbiWord was much better at converting than OpenOffice. More importantly for me at the time, it could be run as a command from within a script, so I didn’t have to open/convert/close every document manually.
I have no idea whether the same holds true now or not. OpenOffice has been more than adequate for any of my recent needs.
Note to self - must read posts thoroughly and engage brain before hitting reply.
Sorry.
I use NeoOffice, which is a Macified port ofOpenOffice. I don’t know what its developers are going to do now that this whole Oracle/LibreOffice situation obtains.
OpenOffice is a terrific suite. I use it at home although we are MS Office at work and our licencing agreement allows me to have MS Office installed on my home machine but I can’t be bothered. We also have OpenOffice installed at work and on at least 3 occasions I have opened Word files that have refused to open in Word and saved someone’s work disappearing. Don’t know how or why it works it just does.
Heh, good advice for anyone 