My wife was laid off yesterday from the American Heart Association. Boo.
Our PC came with Microsoft Works, and we need to get upgraded to Word for resume building and submission. So, 2 questions:
1 - Can yo upgrade from Works to Word? How?
1- If not, is there anywhere to (legally) download a basic (student edition would be be fine) at a more affordable price?
THANKS!!
OpenOffice is free and can export in M$ Word format.
*** Ponder
I’m pretty sure the student edition is the same as the standard edition, it just gets you a discount and expanded usage.
Open office is good but I’d be checking the formatting on Word just to make sure nothing gets screwed up.
You can’t upgrade from Works. You’d want the student edition of Office 2007, which includes Word and is cheaper than buying just Word by itself. You can download a 60-day trial, then buy it online elsewhere for about $100 to get the boxed version and serial number to convert the trial version to the paid version.
If you want to try OpenOffice, there is a free Word viewer available to see how your documents look in Word.
The version of Works I got with my computer can save in Word format (.doc or .docx).
Yup. I don’t know that you need to get Word just to do a resume. You can do any basic formatting you’d need with Works and the end result will be in .doc/.docx format. For a lot of jobs you’ll apply online, where even that is overkill and you’re best served by plain text. In fact, some orgs specify that the electronically submitted resume have ZERO formatting – no bolding, etc., no bullets, no fancy lines or graphics, etc.
Another vote for Open Office.
In the meantime, by “student edition”, do you mean you could qualify for an educational discount? As in you wife is taking at least one course at an accredited school? (Or something like that – MS has a better description of the requirements.) If so, Microsoft’s Office Ultimate Steal program will get you Office Ultimate for $60.
The so-called “student edition” is now called the Home and Student Edition and there is no requirement that anyone in the household be a student. (Note that the license is only for non-commercial use and it doesn’t include Outlook, if that matters.)
I think OpenOffice and Word still format some things differently, so that if you open a word document it will have different margins and spacing. Anyone else have this problem or is it just me?
Word of warning: OpenOffice regularly screws up Word docs for me. Particularly if there’s even vaguely complex formatting - e.g. several different tabs on one paragraph.
ETA: athelas, missed your post - yes, me too!
You can also use Google Documents and save your work as a word document.
I agree with other posters, to make the format as simple as possible, because so many people use other things beside MS Word.
If you need or simply really want to use fancy formats then save the document as a PDF. There are free online converters (Just Google key words) and you can save your MS Works or Open Office as a PDF.
On the other hand, I’ve seen job postings asking for resumes to be submitted in PDF. I know OpenOffice.org can export into PDF natively, but can Microsoft Office do so as well?
(Irrelevant tidbit about resumes: I write mine in LaTeX.)
Yeah - I popped in to say something similar. If you have kids at school for example (my kids are in Fairfax County schools and I could get Office Professional for something like 60 bucks). I believe I’d have to fax them a copy of the kid’s report card as proof before they’d honor the discount.
That said - Open Office is a good choice, and if you’re concerned over the format, email it to a friend who has the real Word and ask him/her to print it so you can look it over.
Office 2007 doesn’t come out of the box with it (at least for pre-SP2) but MS has a free plug-in that will.
Yes, Office 2007 can.
You can download a 60-day trial version from the Office website.
Know anybody with an @edu email address? Get the Ultimate Steal (from Microsoft): 91% off the retail price.
http://www.microsoft.com/student/discounts/theultimatesteal-us/default.aspx
It doesn’t appear to be quite that simple to get that $60 bundle. I have a .edu address through the alumni association (and so do faculty and staff) but that Microsoft website says the offer is valid only for currently registered students.
Wherever possible, I think PDF is a better choice than Word - because there’s really no guarantee that the recipient’s version and configuration of Word will display your document in the way you intended it to look.
-And this remains true even if your intention was to present a plain document with minimal embellishment. Word will gaily re-flow your text, breaking your neat, one-line bullet points into two lines (with perhaps just one word on the second line), extending your carefully-crafted exactly-one-page document into one-and-a-bit pages, inserting the break at just the right point so as to make you look foolish.
A document sent in PDF format will try very, very hard not to do any of that - it should look the same on the recipient’s screen as it does on yours.
So… you don’t really need Word - use OpenOffice (or whatever) to create the document, save to PDF (with built in export function where available, or a PDF virtual printer such as PrimoPDF elsewhere), and relax in the knowledge that some of your competitors efforts are going to look worse than yours.
Yes but some places require it to be in Word format so their cataloging program can can your resume for keywords.
Normally I wouldn’t bother to say this, but given how important a good resume is: Ditto everything that Mangetout just said.