My wife uses MSOffice (just Word, actually) in her translation business (her clients insist), but I have never touched it and don’t have it on my laptop. But we are going away for three weeks and she may need it. WordPad comes close to being sufficient for her needs, but it omits footnotes. I had had the impression that Star Office was free, but no it costs $35 and for that money she can forgo footnotes. But in searching, I found something called OpenOffice that claims to be better and simpler than MSOffice and is free, but makes no claim about being able to read and write Word files. Does anyone have experience with this? Does any Doper have other suggestons?
It can open and save Word and other Office files correctly most of the time. Other times it completely messes up the formatting. Also, Open Office has nowhere near the number of features MS Word has, despite what the fanboys say. Most noticeably for me, it cannot automatically insert ligatures, even if the font supports them. If you’re used to LaTeX output, then looking at an OO.org document is like getting punched in the face.
Still, it’s free, and works on nearly every platform.
OpenOffice does 99% of what Word does. It does have a few problems with whacky formatting, but th it’s the sort of thing the average use will never use. It will happily save files in .doc format.
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That’s what he said 
I use Open Office at home and at the office both MS Word (2003 not the latest) and WordPerfect (you’ll take WordPerfect away from many lawyers when you pry it from their cold, dead, hands.). Very occasionally there are minor formatting issues when moving a document from one to the other, but never any serious problems. Of course, I don’t use anything more complex than outline lists and changing headers&footers; the more complex the feature, the more likely there might be a problem. Footnotes shouldn’t be an issue, but you can of course download OO and check without it costing you anything.
Footnotes are a feature that OpenOffice might or might not support well. In your shoes, I’d run a few tests.
Incidentally, Star Office is just Open Office with a different spellchecker and a few extra features that are more obscure than footnotes.
Since Open Office is free, there’s not really any risk in trying it out for yourself and seeing if it works for you.
MS Word and all the others are prety crummy when compared to LaTeX, that goes without saying.
In some versions of office the license lets you install it on up to three computers.
Look it up here: http://www.microsoft.com/about/legal/useterms/default.aspx
Are we to interpret the op post that the wife has a desk computer and the husband has the laptop? If that’s the case then there should be at least 2 licenses for the MS Word software.
Open office is incredible freeware but it is not as powerful as Word and will require some work to figure out the differences which may not be appreciated by someone on a deadline.
MS Office can be bought cheap if you buy it with a new PC. If you watch for sales you can even get it for free - my copy was free with my Toshiba laptop.
I have both 97 and 2007 and for 99.99% of what I need the 97 version does just fine. I’ve played around with Open Office and it is surprisingly powerful. I’m going to buy a keychain USB drive so I can carry Open Office around with me in case I need it at someone else’s house.
I’m using the beta for Office 2010 now and it works well, but it’s basically Office 2007. It’s free, though, and I don’t know when it will stop working.
You say that like it’s a bad thing. One of the problems with MS Office is that it has too many features, many of which almost nobody actually uses, so all they do is bloat the program and get in the way. Getting rid of those features is a good thing, and if you’re one of the few who actually uses one of them, the cleaner solution is usually to get a separate program that does that specific thing.
Star Office was the original one. When it went open source, Open Office is the free version and Star Office sis the supported one. I have them both installed on my laptop, and there is really no difference outside of versions.
OpenOffice supports footnotes just fine, and a lot more also. If you are doing really, really complex things in Word, there could be a problem, but that is pretty rare.
I’m involved in creating a program brochure for a conference which doesn’t map well - but saving the Office 2007 version in Word 2003 format doesn’t work either.
The office I work for uses M.S. Word 2007 (which I loath). At home, I have Open Office on all my computers. Open Office works fine for me, including formatting and footnotes.
(I miss Wordperfect, however.)
No one is going to use all the features but with a large enough population, everyone uses all of them. One of the criticisms of OO is that it doesnt have feature x or y or doesnt do z, which are small requests but are the difference between migrating from Office and staying.
I think the only real way to test this is to just install the darn thing and have her use it. Its a free download. The features she uses may all be supported.
If you don’t need anything fancy, just use docs.google.com and save the output as a word document.
If you aren’t doing any ultra fancy formatting, it works well
Googling “open office footnotes” finds using footnotes with OO.
Nah. Word can’t match LaTeX, but it’s nowhere near as bad as the output produced by OpenOffice. The missing ligatures was just one example amongst many.
One of the few? There’s a couple of hundred—at most—core features that everybody uses. Let’s say MS Word removes every feature apart from those. But then the majority of people need at least one of the few features that you’ve just removed. So that means thousands of programs now need to be written to add a specific feature to documents—features that were supplied by a single application before.
Say you need three new features: that means you have to have four applications running, three new interfaces to learn, multiple processes eating resources, again just to do the work of one application before.
Even worse, somebody has to write these applications. But parsing a document file is a hard task, even if only 200 features need to be supported, time wasted better doing other things. Everybody is going to have to write their own parser—but wait! How do we save these things? After all, the base document format only has to support 200 features, how could the MS Word developers possibly know about all the additional features that are going to be added by third parties? In effect, we’ll end up with billions of different file formats that each of these specialized tools spit out.
Why, again, is this preferable to providing a single application with all of those features included?
There is an open document format now, which OO used natively and Office 2007 now supports. So that problem is already solved.
The feature set is a good argument for a large organization to use Word, especially if some people are already using rarely used features. But I work for a large company who does not use Word, but who uses OO, and we get along just fine. And for an individual, which this question was about, the availability of a ton of features she’ll never use which makes the tool expensive and bloated is not an advantage.