We’d like to remind Forumites to please avoid political debate on the Forum.
This is to keep it a safe and useful space for MoneySaving discussions. Threads that are – or become – political in nature may be removed in line with the Forum’s rules. Thank you for your understanding.
📨 Have you signed up to the Forum's new Email Digest yet? Get a selection of trending threads sent straight to your inbox daily, weekly or monthly!
The Forum now has a brand new text editor, adding a bunch of handy features to use when creating posts. Read more in our how-to guide
Open Office - just like MS Word but free!
spuds_2
Posts: 874 Forumite
Martin recommended this software elsewhere on MSE but after trying it myself I can strongly recommended it too and thought I would remind people about it. I was in need of a good wordprocessor to write a pile of letters.
I downloaded Open Office for free from here:
http://www.openoffice.org/
It is basically very, very similar to Microsoft Office with a wp, spreadsheet etc. You can 'save as' and load MS files. Thus far (one week) I have found it really easy to use. There may be limits and disadvantages to it, but I haven't found them so far. It does take a while to download and takes us a fair bit of disk space. MS Office is about £85 so I think this is excellent value. The interface seems almost identical to MS Word (haven't used a really up to date version of Word though), so don't be put off by thinking it will seem unfamiliar and hard to get used to. It also seems possible that if your kids or you work on Word at school/work, you could get this at home and send your Word files home as an attachement to an email. Open Office will put them into an Open Office doc so you can carry on. Hope that makes sense.
Someone may well be along in a bit with more info about Open Office, but as it's free there's nothing to lose by giving it a go.
Reason for my letter writing is here: http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.html?t=374284
I downloaded Open Office for free from here:
http://www.openoffice.org/
It is basically very, very similar to Microsoft Office with a wp, spreadsheet etc. You can 'save as' and load MS files. Thus far (one week) I have found it really easy to use. There may be limits and disadvantages to it, but I haven't found them so far. It does take a while to download and takes us a fair bit of disk space. MS Office is about £85 so I think this is excellent value. The interface seems almost identical to MS Word (haven't used a really up to date version of Word though), so don't be put off by thinking it will seem unfamiliar and hard to get used to. It also seems possible that if your kids or you work on Word at school/work, you could get this at home and send your Word files home as an attachement to an email. Open Office will put them into an Open Office doc so you can carry on. Hope that makes sense.
Someone may well be along in a bit with more info about Open Office, but as it's free there's nothing to lose by giving it a go.
Reason for my letter writing is here: http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.html?t=374284
0
Comments
-
Google Documents is of the same ilk. I use it to access important documents anywhere in the world via the website. It has both a Word and Excel replacement.
I also use OpenOffice.org (as a Portable App on my USB drive) and Microsoft Office (at home).0
This discussion has been closed.
Confirm your email address to Create Threads and Reply
Categories
- All Categories
- 354.3K Banking & Borrowing
- 254.4K Reduce Debt & Boost Income
- 455.4K Spending & Discounts
- 247.3K Work, Benefits & Business
- 604K Mortgages, Homes & Bills
- 178.4K Life & Family
- 261.5K Travel & Transport
- 1.5M Hobbies & Leisure
- 16.1K Discuss & Feedback
- 37.7K Read-Only Boards