Don't buy Microsoft Office if you do not need it!

[rg200amp]

I still have my Toshiba Laptop that has Office on it, I just hate using it compared to the new Retina MacBook Pro.

I have a lot of school and job work to do and buying Microsoft Office for my Mac seemed to be the only thing left to do after my free trial was up.

NOT TRUE!

PC and Mac users:

Check out OpenOffice.org!

You can download their FREE office suite. It plays well with MS Office and it has almost everything "tool" wise that MS Office has.

I also hear there is a "Libreoffice" program that works great too.

Anyway, I am very pleased with OpenOffice on my Macs.

 

[RiceCake]

Use LibreOffice, OpenOffice is dead.

Sun (Oracle) basically took over OpenOffice and decided to change the way the game was played, so all the developers took a fork of the code and kept maintaining it open source, GPL and free as LibreOffice.

Sun of course didn't want to play game and OpenOffice became depreciated and is now not maintained.

Edit: Sorry, they rebranded OpenOffice as "Apache OpenOffice" and started maintaining it for themselves. LibreOffice though is just as powerful, if not moreso, and not controlled corporately.

 

[asiancivicmaniac]

Whatever version of MS Office I have on my MBP actually seems rather polished compared to the ones I find on most Windows. I hated the one where they took away the menu on the top and put everything into bubbles that made no sense to me.

 

[JHZR2]

I get MS office for windows or mac through work for like $9.99. I think I can get a copy a year. MS has some kind of agreement that clients that have lots of licenses for lots of workstations get, where the employees can get the softwre for their home machine.

MS implementation of office is fairly bad, at least in excel. Working with big data files with lots of points to plot makes it work really slow.

But it is the standard...

My wife uses OpenOffice on her MBP, and hasnt had any issues. First thing we did was make it save in the real MS formats...

 

[Loobed]

I use open office. It is not as good as Microsoft for power users, but for just ordinary people it is great. Its FREE.

 

[CarbonSteel]

Originally Posted By: JHZR2
I get MS office for windows or mac through work for like $9.99. I think I can get a copy a year. MS has some kind of agreement that clients that have lots of licenses for lots of workstations get, where the employees can get the softwre for their home machine.

+1 - it comes as part of an enterprise select agreement (usually). I just loaded Office 2013 on 2 of my home computers for less than $10. The cloud attached storage is a nice add-on (yes, I know that is has been available separately) and so I have copied of my documents anywhere (plus they are copied out to my Google drive too).

We have nearly 20K machines these days in my company and although I romance the idea of "open" software, MS drives the market, thus it is difficult to topple the giant.

 

[LeakySeals]

Been using OpenOffice for years. Away from the chains of Oracle was the best thing that ever happened to OO. Its deployed at some really large companies and is the vast majority of the non-MS installed base.

 

[rg200amp]

Im going to download and try LibreOffice too.

It is not a FULL replacement for MS Office. But for the basics and a even a bit more, these free programs are good.

 

[simple_gifts]

Quote:

Don't buy Microsoft Office OS if you do not need it!


At this point every alternative is better. I can get Office for a nominal fee because of where I work, but I never had any reason to....

 

[soyeahiknow]

There is another way to do it. If you search for the Microsoft Office codes online you can usually get it for free from some code generator.

Ps. I do not advocate breaking any laws to do this, but I had to do it once on a legally purchased Office when I had to do a complete OS reinstall and they said I already used the code that came with my Office!

 

[BearZDefect]

Have the critics of Excel tried working with the same large workbooks in Open/LibreOffice? I have found Open/LibreOffice to be noticeably slower than Excel, to the point that it can become a nuisance if you're not using recent hardware. Like some other people, I still prefer Office 2003 to the later contorted revisions.

I agree that most casual users don't need MS Office, no need to pay that extra $100+. But it's surprising how many people who have worked in an office think they can't do any work on a computer with the real MS Office. Same people send out a native Publisher file to a large group of email recipients and wonder why most of them cannot view that document. They have no idea what the open standard file formats are.

 

[jimbrewer]

Go one step better and get Linux. My wife had a Pentium IV celeron laptop in 2001 that was too slow right out of the box. We nearly threw it out several times. I found out about Linux Puppy and run the thing off a USB. To put it in perspective, a Pentium IV has about 10% of the switches of an i5 to begin with, and this is a Celeron. It has 'Abiword' which is an excellent lightweight word processor. You are limited in your fonts but how many do you need? The hardware is at the ragged edge of handling a Youtube video. The box gets hot! But its still a very useful machine. Definitely try it before your throw out that four year old laptop.

 

[Hokiefyd]

Granted, the last time I used OpenOffice was a few years ago, but it didn't have near the polish or features that Microsoft Office has. I use Excel a lot, and the OOo version of Excel just didn't cut it. I have Office for Mac 2011 and there appears to be nearly 100% reciprocity (or whatever the term is) between the PC and Mac version now.

 

[2004tdigls]

actually open office is not dead, version 4 is on its way:

http://www.openoffice.org/download/

It is an excellent product, particularly for the price which is free

 

[PandaBear]

I use Libre Office once in a while, but it is not perfect and I found myself going back to MS Office 2007 once in a while.

A lot of the document with graphics doesn't look the same between them. If I only use Libre Office I run the risk of a well formatted presentation turning weird when I work on it in MS Office (or vice versa).

This is especially true if you have lots of table and graphs in your document.

 

[KrisZ]

I also got my version of office through my employer for $10.
For that kind of money there is no point to look for alternatives.

 

[RiceCake]

Originally Posted By: LeakySeals
Been using OpenOffice for years. Away from the chains of Oracle was the best thing that ever happened to OO. Its deployed at some really large companies and is the vast majority of the non-MS installed base.


Away from the chains of Oracle? Then, have fun with OpenOffice. The entire reason LibreOffice exists is because OpenOffice IS chained up by Oracle now that they have control of it.

Originally Posted By: 2004tdigls
actually open office is not dead, version 4 is on its way:

http://www.openoffice.org/download/

It is an excellent product, particularly for the price which is free


Try reading my entire post next time. Also, I refuse to use OpenOffice because OpenOffice was always free and open-source. Oracle took that and decided it was free but that they owned it. Stuff like that tends to alienate developers and they left, and Oracle also decided to fire a lot of the OpenOffice project's paid coders.

This is why I support LibreOffice.

 

[Garak]

It's still open source regardless of what Oracle thinks. You can't undo an open source license that way. You can stifle development, but the freedom to change the package exists, and that's why LO is out there. It's really like trying to kill the Hydra. They can stifle one version but two more will appear to replace it. The joke is on any of the for-profit companies that even tried to exert any meaningful control over it. MS and Apple don't even bother with nonsense like that, and if they don't do it, you know it's a losing cause.

 

[Brons2]

MS Office 2010 Starter came free on my newish laptop. I use that and it's fine. Does have ads but what do you expect for free closed source software?

We do also have a Enterprise Select Agreement at work so I purchased the full version for my GF's computer since she is in grad school.

I use Libre Office on my Linux installations and it's ok but it does have compatibility and formatting issues with regular MS office.

Lastly, I love the ribbon, all you luddites can keep Office2003.

 

[LeakySeals]

Originally Posted By: RiceCake
Originally Posted By: LeakySeals
Been using OpenOffice for years. Away from the chains of Oracle was the best thing that ever happened to OO. Its deployed at some really large companies and is the vast majority of the non-MS installed base.


Away from the chains of Oracle? Then, have fun with OpenOffice. The entire reason LibreOffice exists is because OpenOffice IS chained up by Oracle now that they have control of it.

Originally Posted By: 2004tdigls
actually open office is not dead, version 4 is on its way:

http://www.openoffice.org/download/

It is an excellent product, particularly for the price which is free


Try reading my entire post next time. Also, I refuse to use OpenOffice because OpenOffice was always free and open-source. Oracle took that and decided it was free but that they owned it. Stuff like that tends to alienate developers and they left, and Oracle also decided to fire a lot of the OpenOffice project's paid coders.

This is why I support LibreOffice.

I go all the way back to Star Office. Your view is very recent and short sighted. OO was the original open source alternative incubated by Sun Micro in the days when there was no internet collaboration like today. Any developer thats been around for a while knows that. BTW, Oracle has dropped OO which was the point I was making. They never wanted it in the first place, inherited it from the Sun Merger. You can support LO all you want. But its a small fish in a big pond. Primary users of LO are geeks using freeware. There really isn't anything earth shattering that would make the big fish move over other than some code developers jumped off the OO ship with. LO is becoming a bloated behemoth fast IMO. I say in the long run OO wins. But would I refuse to use LO? Huh? Why? I use everything and anything free. The only things I wont use are the monopolies. Like IE and Chrome for example. No, you can't make me "Install Google Chrome". I hacked your button off your search page via ABP. Googles trying to control everything, quickly becoming another Microsoft. But thats another discussion.