Anyone use Open Office?

Out of curiosity I've just opened what I thought was a fairly straightforward document created with Word 2007 in both LibreOffice (6.1.6 so latest stable version) and OpenOffice 4.1.6. Neither of them correctly handled one of the styles I use: essentially a numbered list which in Word gives me an automatically-generated number then a tab followed by the text. OpenOffice missed out the numbers whereas LibreOffice retained them but indented them instead of left-justifying them. OpenOffice will only save as a .doc file (as well as .odt, it's native format) which suggests that it doesn't understand Word 2003 onwards very well whereas LibreOffice seems to know about .docx.

Both are, I'm sure, entirely coherent (and of course free) but I'm not convinced that OpenOffice is a substitute for Word if you've documents that need any cleverness in their formatting. LibreOffice seems better at first glance but it's not a perfect substitute if you're sharing documents.
 
You could always just go get a onedrive account and you get online word, excel and PowerPoint for free as well as some free online storage. It will even work on your phone, pc or mac with zero install, just a browser.
 
The only thing missing for most users from Open and Libre is Outlook, not important for home use, more so for business.
 
JohnnyBoxer said:
Laptop or pc ?
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It's to put on my lads gaming PC. No real need for it at the moment, but I'd like hm to have Word or equivalent such as Open Office to mess around on and learn at home. He's good at learning stuff my messing around and teaching himself.

If I found a trustworthy Amazon or eBay seller with Office licence keys (like I did for W10) then I'd stick with MS, but I aint paying MS an annual subscription for it. They can suck my fat one!
 
Outtomunch said:
Are either/both fully compatible with Word?

Andres
Click to expand...
As Oldie says, for most purposes they are, but you might need to do some reformatting. For very complex documents, (endnotes, footnotes, captions and lots of structure and internal cross referencing), Word is still (unfortunately) king.

On the other hand Word (on a Mac at least) is rather unstable and there are some features that either don't work at all or require byzantine 'work arounds'. There were a number of operations that I could do to make it crash every time.
 
I bought an Office 2016 licence as a download from Amazon last September for £16.00. Ok, it was limited to one machine, but I thought these were still available?
 
Check to see if your employer has done a deal to get an employee offer
Many public sector types have, just bought a full license for office professional plus for just over £13.00
And genuine too!
 
Mr Bean said:
I bought an Office 2016 licence as a download from Amazon last September for £16.00. Ok, it was limited to one machine, but I thought these were still available?
Click to expand...

That's what I have done on my machines - I also installed Visio Pro and Project Pro on 2 machines for about the same cost.
 
The Bear said:
It's to put on my lads gaming PC. No real need for it at the moment, but I'd like hm to have Word or equivalent such as Open Office to mess around on and learn at home. He's good at learning stuff my messing around and teaching himself.

If I found a trustworthy Amazon or eBay seller with Office licence keys (like I did for W10) then I'd stick with MS, but I aint paying MS an annual subscription for it. They can suck my fat one!
Click to expand...

Onlline firm called softwaregeeks seem pretty good, they do actually answer support emails, and the product appears genuine, several of my customers use them - https://softwaregeeks.co.uk/product-category/microsoft-office/
 
The Bear said:
The other option is buying a virus ridden licence key from eBay.
Click to expand...

If all you are buying is a license key to convert a trial installation of MS Office to a fully licensed version then there can be no virus that comes with it.

If the seller is asking you to download something to make MS Office become fully licensed then yes, there is a chance that you could be downloading viruses or other nasties
 
Nippy Normans supply Touratech, Wunderlich, Desert Fox and many other makes of accessories.
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