Where to buy Microsoft Word

Natb8886

Open Office is completely free and should allow you to do everything MS office does, although some of its features can be a bit annoying and it might take a bit of getting familiar with if you are used to MS Office. It is also fully compatible, so anything done in MS Office can be opened in Open Office and vice versa. It should allow your son to do work at home and use it in college as well.

phona

Ddunn wrote: »

The only reason I've recommended OpenOffice is it's what I've been using for many years now and since its done the job I've never felt the need to change it, but looking at the LibreOffice website its looks like an improved version of OpenOffice made by the same base of people so I will try it next time I need to!

It's not long since Libre forked from Open and the two are still pretty similar. Libre is moving faster now and has features Open doesn't but I shouldn't think they matter much to the average user.
While there is no reason to change from Open to Libre (other than silly nerd turf-wars) the OP is new to the world of open-source office software so might as well use the one people are tending towards rather than away from since, eventually, support for Open will fade away.

Hapshade

I'd personally choose LibreOffice over OpenOffice.org. They've done a lot of work tidying up the code and have improved the import filters a great deal, so you should have far fewer problems importing Office documents.

I say this as a student who has been using the above for assignments the past two years.

Masomnia

Another vote for using one of the free ones. I've been using Open Office for a few years now, used it at Uni no problems.

You can save your work as a word file, and open word files, so it's compatible with the Microsoft version.

As above try it out and if it doesn't work then you can shell out, but if it's your general word processing you need it for then there's no point getting the Microsoft one imho.