MS Office software

mutley74

anyone where i can buy MS Office (word, excel) preferably version 2000 or newer from?

Alos where i can buy Win 2000 from to update the OS on an old pc.

cheers

Benchy_2

Take a look at this comparison of office suites. Theres a free one there which is compatible with MS Word and Excel which could be worth considering rather then spending the extortionate amount that Office costs.

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/labs/122/office-suites/products.html

For MS Office though I would look through all the price comparison websites. Found it for £140ish on Kelkoo at a shop called https://www.Feama.co.uk.

pin

Have you thought about trying out OpenOffice? It is freeware, so you don't have to pay anything for it. I've been using it for the past 6 months and have been happy with it.

mutley74

Have you thought about trying out OpenOffice?  It is freeware, so you don't have to pay anything for it.  I've been using it for the past 6 months and have been happy with it.

as its free is there a catch? i.e. .imited service or does it bring pop up ads?

Will be interested if anyone has an old copy willing to 'swap' something to me...PM me please.

sablade

Review of Office suites

Comparing: OpenOffice 1.1.2 Microsoft Works Suite 2005 Microsoft Works 8 Microsoft Office 2003 Lotus SmartSuite 9.8 Corel WordPerfect Office 12 Standard Edition Ability Office 4

COMPANY: OpenOffice PRICE: Free
RATING 6/6: ISSUE: 122 DATE: Dec 04

Verdict: The best all-round office suite is also the cheapest. With excellent Microsoft compatibility, a consistent interface and a good network of ad-hoc support, this is the king of the business tools.

View Spec Table
OpenOffice is a little different to all the other suites on offer here. For starters, it's free: you can download it from https://www.openoffice.org, and we've saved you the trouble by including it on this month's cover disc. The lack of cost is due to the open-source movement, a community of developers willing to work as a team, for free, to improve existing code. And the best thing about OpenOffice is that it had some excellent code to work with in the first place: Sun's StarOffice.

This doesn't mean that it's 'cobbled together by amateurs'. In fact, this is a very forward-looking piece of software. While being fully Microsoft Office-compatible, it also has its own XML-based file format for documents and spreadsheets. This is a significant advance, as it looks to a future when we'll be storing our data on centralised servers and accessing it through all manner of asyet undefined applications.

The one area where it does look amateur is its appearance. Very much the ugly duckling of office suites, OpenOffice (and StarOffice) looks like it was put together five years ago. There's a reason for this: it runs on Windows, Linux, Solaris and the Mac, so adopts a common theme across all editions. However, as the toolbars of each module look the same, when you've got used to one application you'll know how everything else works, too.

Before you get too picky about the look and feel, though, remember one thing: it's free. Installation takes less than two minutes and drops the OpenOffice Quickstarter into your System Tray. This gives you right-click access to new text documents, spreadsheets, presentations and drawings.

Unlike Microsoft Office, the suite lets you export your documents as an Acrobat PDF and, as with the other suites on test, it has a few quirks all of its own. It's a fan of floating panels - much like Photoshop or old editions of Dreamweaver. In each application, these include the Stylist and the Navigator. While the first controls the look of onscreen elements, such as fonts and pages, the latter is a real time-saver, letting you quickly access specific parts of your document on the basis of content. With just two clicks you should be able to locate a specific table within a financial report, or a particular section in a technical manual. If you work with long documents, it's a must.

Word Processor

Non-typists will welcome the word processor's type-ahead feature. This examines what you've entered so far and then does its best to guess the rest of the word you're typing. It usually gets it right, but if you're writing a list, with a carriage return at the end of each line you could find it adding words you didn't want. 'You', for example, will be translated into 'you'll', at which point you'll probably switch it off.

Microsoft converts will need to spend some time learning a new menu layout. Word count, for example, is hidden away inside the statistics tab of the document properties, which itself is buried in the File menu. We much prefer it to be kept on the Tools menu or, even better, on the toolbar. We'd also like the option to count words in a section of our document, not just the whole thing, although the early development builds of the OpenOffice 2 (currently at 1.9.m51 and not recommended for general use) have put it into the Tools menu. This build also sees the move to a more attractive set of Microsoft-style toolbars.

There isn't much in the way of wizards in the current release. Instead, you have a small selection of templates that includes faxes, business cards and expense claim forms. Of more interest to creative users will be the Gallery, which includes a wide range of images for use in documents, and sounds for dropping into web pages and presentations. It also includes the expected range of autocorrect and auto text features to knock your work into shape and insert commonly used text strings whenever you type an abbreviation. It politely pops up a light bulb in the corner of the screen each time it does this, which isn't as effective as the smart icons used by Microsoft Office, but does at least let you do a quick Undo before you've typed on and committed yourself to a lengthy backtrack.

Compatibility with Microsoft Word is excellent, with OpenOffice coming closer than any other application to a perfect rendering of our test document. Page margins were correctly interpreted, framed sidebar text remained locked in place and a table-based, annotated screen grab was only slightly overwritten by the keyed captions to each side. Although it straightened our rotated image, it did manage to import the Word Art, which was a surprise.

Presentations

When it comes to Presentations, the range of templates on offer is underwhelming and probably best avoided. However, stepping through the New Presentation Wizard is an effective way to organise your thoughts, and set common parameters such as transitions and speeds before you start. It can be set to automatically advance each slide at a specific interval, and presentations can be exported as Flash files. Combine these features with an embedded commentary and you have the perfect tool for creating online presentations without writing a single

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line of code. It could also save you a lot of money on buying Macromedia Breeze, which starts at more than £20,000 and, among other things, offers a very similar feature.

Font handling within Presentations is excellent, with superbly anti-aliased results. We were a little disappointed, though, to see that although you can drag out as many guidelines as you want from the horizontal and vertical rulers, frames will only snap to them on resizing if you have the Shift key held down. In itself, this wouldn't be a problem if Shift wasn't the modifier for proportional scaling. As things stand, you could find yourself with wildly oversized text boxes purely for the sake of neatness.

Although there's a dedicated web editor bundled with the suite, the Presentations module is well suited to outputting HTML, with a range of web-focused features, including image map creation. It also includes a variety of display options that should help in gauging the effectiveness of your presentation when output to different media. The greyscale mode, for example, will give some idea how your handouts will look on a laser printer.

Unfortunately it all feels somewhat modular. There's a very definite jump from the slide design workspace to that for writing your presenter notes, and again when switching to the Outline view.

Presentations copes well with PowerPoint imports, recognising our skewed graphic and rendering our Word Art in similar-sized and identically coloured text, which although not perfect is certainly very good. Fade transitions between each slide were unfortunately lost, but are easily replaced, and not as important as a successful import of the slide contents.

Spreadsheet

The last major application is the Spreadsheet. This looks and works very much like Excel, and it uses almost identical formulas, unlike Quattro Pro (part of WordPerfect Office) and Lotus 123, both of which stray from the norm. It also puts almost everything in the same place on menus, so will be familiar to switchers.

Quattro does win back some points in the way it handles formula tracking, whereby each cell referenced in a sum will be highlighted in a different colour so that you can see which part of the sum uses it. OpenOffice Spreadsheet, however, makes only one distinction: value or total, with numbers displayed in blue, and formula results rendered green.

Of the two main contenders for Excel's crown, OpenOffice Spreadsheet's charting tools are easier to use. We found plotting two sets of data against one another far simpler here than in Quattro Pro, which preferred to display them side by side, rather than using one as the scale for the other. Sadly the results, when sent to a new page in the Spreadsheet book, look ugly when compared to Excel's efforts: they're dumped onto a regular spreadsheet page, complete with gridlines rather than resized to fit the aspect ratio of the application window and dropped on a blank page.

Simple conditional formatting is excellent, put together through a well thought-out dialog that can be dumped if you'd rather work out your own code. It also properly imported a file with conditional formatting in place - more than can be said for Lotus 1-2-3. However, when defining your own conditional formatting you must first define your style in the Stylist, and then apply that style name to the matching cell; you can't define styles on-the-fly. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, as it means you'll be using a common set of house styles throughout your work, but some may prefer the freeform approach of Excel.

Spreadsheet had no problem importing our Excel chart, matching the colours and styles of the original, but didn't expand the Y-axis beyond the highest point of our curve. As such, the peak was lost where it met the top border of the chart.

If there's one killer feature it's Goal seek, also in Excel, which can work your formats backwards and show you how to achieve a specific result, rather than simply work out the result of adding two variables you already know. For example, you know how much money you want to borrow from the bank, the interest rate it charges and what the repayments will cost. That doesn't max out your salary, though, so you're more interested in knowing how much you could borrow before you reach your limit, rather than increasing the loan amount by small increments until the repayments cell hits your limit. It takes care of all the trial and error for you, bringing up the answer you're after and, if you choose, replacing the original loan amount with the one that represents your total borrowing capacity.

CONCLUSION

OpenOffice has its own set of suite-wide XML-based file formats, which should pretty much guarantee compatibility across multiple platforms, and transfer smoothly to the Web. You can, of course, do what we did and switch the defaults to Word and Excel, but that's rather missing the point.

There's so much cross-over between the various modules on offer in OpenOffice that it's an excellent choice for the first-time user. Word and Excel are simple enough once you've got to grips with them, but they have such distinct features that skills learnt in one can't be immediately transferred to the other. This ability is OpenOffice's trump card. All open documents will even feature in the Window menus of each running module so you can switch from a spreadsheet to a specific presentation without ever touching the Windows taskbar.

As we've pointed out, there are a few shortcomings, but with a dedicated following in the development community it won't be long before they're ironed out. In the meantime, the fact it's a free download is enough for us to brush them to one side and fully endorse OpenOffice over and above Microsoft Office 2003 for both home and corporate use (see Sun StarOffice 7).

loafer_2

This info may be of use since no one else posted it: http://www.openoffice.org/

casper2004

There may be a bit of a clash of formats if you have a lot of documents in some other format eg importing MS Office document into Openoffice.

But for the difference in cost think it might be a niggle worth it.

Note if you are a student, parent or teacher you can get a discounted version of MS Office, which if i am correct can be used on up to 3 pc's.

condyk

Note if you are a student, parent or teacher you can get a discounted version of MS Office, which if i am correct can be used on up to 3 pc's.

That is absolutely correct. The lcence is for parents, teachers and students and covers instalation on up to 3 PC's. The licence does not allow for commercial use, or 'educational'.

I supplied copies only last week and client delighted, as they each expected to pay 300 quid +!

Cheapest place then was Amazon. I think it was around 90 quid per copy.

condyk

Sorry ... meant to say ONLY educational, i.e. you can't use it for anything other than educational purposes.

Chippy_Minton

anyone where i can buy MS Office (word, excel) preferably version 2000 or newer from?

eBay is your best bet.

sablade

There may be a bit of a clash of formats if you have a lot of documents in some other format eg importing MS Office document into Openoffice.

.

No should be no clash of formats...

OpenOffice.org is able to read and write Microsoft Office files. This allows users to open and save Word, Excel and PowerPoint files on their preferred platform incl. Windows, Linux and Solaris.

Compatibility with Microsoft Word is excellent, with OpenOffice coming closer than any other application to a perfect rendering of our test document. Page margins were correctly interpreted, framed sidebar text remained locked in place and a table-based, annotated screen grab was only slightly overwritten by the keyed captions to each side. Although it straightened our rotated image, it did manage to import the Word Art, which was a surprise.