Free Office Software and MS Office

prowla

macman wrote: »

Since Libre Office is free, it costs nothing to try it first and find out. I've recommended it to several users who were about to rush out and spend £100+ on MS Office, and none (to my knowledge) has found it inadequate or incompatible for home use.

I'm not saying it is a bad product, but the real cost is in the time and effort to try it out and/or in working around incompatibilities; in a business environment that could cost more money than the price of the MS offering, and in an educational one it could lead to issues with being able to do and/or submitting work.

In a business or educational environment it may be worth checking out whether MS Office is available under discount; I got a 2-user copy of MS Office for £9.95 under my company HUP.

cookie365

VBA doesn't work on LibreOffice or OpenOffice, so no macros, none of the addons work.

LibreOffice is great if you want a table of data that you can sort and produce charts from, and don't mind it looking 15 years out of date

But if you need any kind of complexity, go for Excel.

macman

prowla wrote: »

I'm not saying it is a bad product, but the real cost is in the time and effort to try it out and/or in working around incompatibilities; in a business environment that could cost more money than the price of the MS offering, and in an educational one it could lead to issues with being able to do and/or submitting work.

In a business or educational environment it may be worth checking out whether MS Office is available under discount; I got a 2-user copy of MS Office for £9.95 under my company HUP.

I was referring to home users. Although plenty of businesses are also moving away from the Microsoft strangehold.

Lum

There's often little subtle differences between MS Office and the free ones, at least that's been my experience, e.g. all the bullet points in my CV got screwed up and the bottom two lines got pushed onto a separate page. Made my CV look like crap when opened up in MS Office.

As for 2010 vs 2013, not sure what point there is in 2013 apart from the fact that it will last a bit longer before MS stop putting out security updates for it. I'm quite happy with 2010 on Windows 8. Got the 3-user pack for 90 quid which suits us quite well, but is not available with 2013.

If you don't like the ribbon, install ubitmenu!

shaun_from_Africa

prowla wrote: »

In a business or educational environment it may be worth checking out whether MS Office is available under discount; I got a 2-user copy of MS Office for £9.95 under my company HUP.

It's even cheaper if you are able to purchase in $US.
I bought this a couple of months ago and it was only $9.95. (£6.42 on my credit card). Something else that is also vastly cheaper overseas compared to the UK.

Mondez

Lum wrote: »

There's often little subtle differences between MS Office and the free ones, at least that's been my experience, e.g. all the bullet points in my CV got screwed up and the bottom two lines got pushed onto a separate page. Made my CV look like crap when opened up in MS Office.

As for 2010 vs 2013, not sure what point there is in 2013 apart from the fact that it will last a bit longer before MS stop putting out security updates for it. I'm quite happy with 2010 on Windows 8. Got the 3-user pack for 90 quid which suits us quite well, but is not available with 2013.

If you don't like the ribbon, install ubitmenu!

Why does it matter if your CV in MS office looks messed up unless you are letting someone else use it as a template for their own (in which case they can fix the formatting for themselves)? If you are going to send your CV out when applying for jobs it should be PDF, that way you know exactly how it will look to anyone that opens or prints it. Even MS Office itself can be inconsistent between versions of how a format looks (though recent versions have been better).

Lum

Many employers demand that the CV be in Word formar rather than something sensible like PDF or RTF.

If this happens and your CV ends up looking terrible, you aren't getting the job.

elektra

And then there is google docs which also seems to alter the formatting.

MSword (2003) - 2 page doc prints fine.

open as attachment in Gmail view - it pushed it on to 3 pages

from gmail view choose edit option - that then moved the start of the second page onto bottom of the 1st page

so neither of those versions how I originally intended it. Will test it with a later version of word.

Mondez

Lum wrote: »

Many employers demand that the CV be in Word formar rather than something sensible like PDF or RTF.

If this happens and your CV ends up looking terrible, you aren't getting the job.

Your mileage may vary but I have always sent CVs as pdf when they are requested electronically with an offer of alternate formats if needed and I have never been asked to provide an alternate format, regardless of what format the job description specified (if any).

Lum

Well I guess it depends on the employer in question, but if asked for Word and you send PDF, that may flag with some as "Can't follow instructions".

Though I guess it's also likely that it will land with the typical incompetent HR department who won't even notice that a different program loaded.