For very large values of free.
???
What’s not free about it?
ETA: Hmmm…that link doesn’t go where I wanted it to go…
Is the first result here free Office?
https://www.google.com/search?num=20&newwindow=1&site=&source=hp&q=office+free+online&oq=office+free+online&gs_l=hp.3..0l2j0i22i30l8.1296.7051.0.7194.19.17.0.2.2.0.230.1969.10j6j1.17.0....0...1c.1.64.hp..0.18.1754.0..35i39j0i131j0i3j0i20.kxFLyDb34zg
You just have to input all of the RTF markup yourself, and make sure you use the correct file extension. Yeah, fine, no WYSIWYG, but RTF is a text format.
That has just a small subset of Office features. You’d be better off using Google Docs. The real deal is going to cost you, and if you’re in a position where you have to use Word, you’ll need the missing features…
My wife loved WordPerfect for the “reveal codes”. Myself, I have never used either Word or WordPerfect since I need plain vanilla text as input to the markup language TeX that produces beautiful mathematics and use a general editing program for everything. AFAIK, every mathematics journal accepts only TeX input (and formats it based on its own style).
On the other hand, my daughter is chief copy editor for a suite of scientific journals and they want all their input in Word, which they use as input to PageMaker that they use to prepare final output.
Real men use runoff - or the Bell Labs mm packages. (I did my dissertation in runoff, back before there were laser printers.)
IEEE journals use Word.
At work we use Open Office on our PCs or Libre Office on Linux machines. I switched from OO to Libre Office at home when I switched machines. Libre Office has worked fine.
The only incompatibility I’ve seen between Word and OO for non-complex documents is that OO uses a slightly different double quote character than Word. I’m using Word to edit something I started in OO and it sometimes looks odd. I’ll eventually do a massive search and replace. It might come from OO’s origin in Germany before Sun bought them.
The Power Point equivalent in OO is by far the least compatible thing. That screws even simple things up.
Small correction: Real men use TECO as the text editor and RUNOFF as the markup language. 
I still say that TECO is the best non-WYSIWYG text editor that ever existed. Its macros could do absolutely anything with amazing brevity and simplicity.
Ugh, what scientific journals use Word? Everything in physics is TeX filtered through a journal style template, like you described for mathematics. And in fact most of the journals have all agreed to use the same template as Physical Review, the dominant [set of] journal[s].
Perhaps any journal in which equations aren’t massively dominant. The leading journal Nature, for example, prefers submissions in Word, with initial review drafts in either Word or PDF.
Word changes quotes to be curly rather than straight “quotes like this.” In some versions, you could Ctrl+Z to revert back to the straight ones, or turn off the conversion.
Germans typically use outward-facing high/low quotes „just like this“ don’t they?
I think some of the compatibility problems in Calc arise with formulas who get messed up (to be fair, when Office 2007 came out, previous versions were screwed up for some time because users didn’t get service packs). But Excel is just infinitely more intuitive and user-friendly.
Yeah, I’ve never encountered one that *forbids *Word, but many accept multiple formats. The copy editors may convert it, but that’s after it’s out of the author’s hands. Here, they also lagged when .docx came out with Office 2007, and many I’ve tried would only accept .doc for some time.
Oh, yeah, runoff! First such software I ever encountered!
But yes, WP Reveal Codes it’s a beautiful thing…
In my work we use certain documents template-formatted in Word so at a certain point you begin line-numbering, and Word handles that through a section break. When you open them in OO or Libre, it applies numbering to the entire document. Annoying.
I didn’t read all the replies.
But Open Office has been taken over by the same group that supports Apache. Maybe this is a good thing.
I have used Open Office for many years, and find it adequate for my limited needs. I can import most MS formatted things OK, but sometimes not perfect. I can then save them in MS formats that are used fine by those that sent me the MS things. But again. In my limited use and simple items.
I have donated to the Open Office supporters as well as the Mozilla project, several times. $50 buck a shot. I recommend that all users do so as well.
There is a price for freedom of choice.
Much cheaper in the long run than losing that option to choose.
It might be worth mentioning that one of the rare good things that Microsoft has ever done for free is provided add-ons to older versions of Office to support these new XML-based formats in Word, Powerpoint, and Excel. Hence Word 2002 (Office XP) and 2003 can be enabled to both read and write .docx formats. I’ve installed versions for both, and though I haven’t used them very extensively, I’ve never had a problem with .docx compatibility.
As I’m in China, it’s no surprise that the alternative suite used by the staff and students at my school is Kingsoft, aka WPS.
LibreOffice is the better developed branch of the old OpenOffice.
How does NeoOffice fit in there?
Same idea as LO/AOO, but it’s Mac only.
I meant, how does it fit into the forked lineage?