FREE ALTERNATIVE TO MICOSOFT WORD?

[fulton]

I sometimes receive forms, as attachments to emails, to fill out for exhibitions etc. how do I enable editing to do this, without paying for Word, have used the free online office.com, but some files will not upload to it and if I do manage it, not sure how I did it! My first laptop came with a basic word programme included, which did everything I wanted, also came with a basic paint programme, which again did everything I wanted, what are the alternatives?

[Izzy]

I use Libre office which is free and open source. It has all the tools you could want and will open and save documents in just about any file format you choose.

 

Bob

[SRman]

There are a few freeware Office programs available. While I use MS Office on my laptop and main desktop computers, I didn't need or want to pay for a licence for my train room computer: for that, I downloaded and installed Libre Office, which includes a word processor compatible with MS Word documents, and also a spreadsheet which I can use to open MS Excel spreadsheets. 

It's worth a try and if you don't like it, uninstall it again and try a different one.

[ikcdab]

Try

OpenOffice 

Google Docs 

 

Are you sure you are not eligible for office365 in some way.  I have not looked into this thoughly, but it seems to me that you only have to sign up for a free Microsoft account and you can use their apps for free.  May not be the whole package though.

 

 

 

 

[spamcan61]

At home I have Libre Office on one machine and Open Office on another, despite paying for Microsoft 365* (for the cloud storage). I find it easy enough to swap between those and Office; I definitely wanted to stick with 'on premises' apps rather than relying on cloud for them.

 

*Well after yesterday's 'fun' with Teams it's more Microsoft 364

Edited January 26, 2023 by spamcan61

[ikcdab]

14 minutes ago, spamcan61 said:

At home I have Libre Office on one machine and Open Office on another, despite paying for Microsoft 365 (for the cloud storage). I find it easy enough to swap between the 3; I definately wanted to stick with 'on premises' apps rather than relying on cloud for them.

I think I tend to agree with this, certainly on my home desktop and laptop, the apps are installed locally and so I can use them offline.   But when I'm out and about with just my phone, I think I'm using cloud apps and that has never been a problem for me.... At least you know they are always updated.   One thing though, at the risk of going off topic, do make sure that all of your data is in the cloud and therefore thoroughly backed up.  I pay for Dropbox, it's a fairly small fee and means that not only is my data safe, but  I can access it on any device.  I am still quaintly charmed to be able to work on something on my desktop then to move to my laptop and just pick up where I left off.  It also means that ALL of my data, photos, docs, whatever going right back as far as I want is immediately available on my phone wherever I am.

Ian

Edited January 26, 2023 by ikcdab

[RedgateModels]

11 minutes ago, ikcdab said:

  I pay for Dropbox, it's a fairly small fee and means that not only is my data safe, but  I can access it on any device.  I am still quaintly charmed to be able to work on something on my desktop then to move to my laptop and just pick up where I left off.  It also means that ALL of my data, photos, docs, whatever going right back as far as I want is immediately available on my phone wherever I am.

Ian

 to carry on further off topic, I pay for 1Tb of MS OneDrive storage, so again important stuff is synced over PC, phone and iPad. Bonus with this is I also get MS Office 365 for the same money. 

 

Are the MS apps free to use?

[woodenhead]

You can use Office for free as long as it is done via Office.com and the documents are all stored online - i.e. no local storage, so you do need an internet connection at all times.

 

I use Libre Office, have done for years, it has everything you need for main features and as it creates open source documents, they can be opened by Microsoft applications or other open source applications if you send them to other people.

 

I also use Mozilla Thunderbird for emails instead of the basic MS Outlook that ships with Windows as it is more richly featured

[SRman]

I should add to my earlier posting that I don't use the subscription versions of Office 365. I bought perpetual stand-alone licences for Office 2019 and 2021 for the separate computers.

[JeremyC]

Another user of Libre Office which seems to do everything you need for home use.

Apparently Libre Office and Open Office are very similar because the former is a development fork of the latter. It appears that Libre Office is more actively supported.

https://www.libreoffice.org/discover/libreoffice-vs-openoffice/

https://itsfoss.com/libreoffice-vs-openoffice/#:~:text=LibreOffice is an easy choice,in their 32-bit systems.

Edited January 26, 2023 by JeremyC

[MJI]

I use Libre Office at home and been using Thunderbird since MS scrapped Outlook Express so a very long time.

[Hroth]

I installed the latest versions of Libre Office, Thunderbird and Firefox on a new Win 11 laptop last weekend.

 

Its a software combination that I've been happy to use without any problems for at least a decade.  Can't be that long, can it?

 

Edited January 26, 2023 by Hroth

[D9020 Nimbus]

LibreOffice is essentially the continuation of OpenOffice.org. When Sun (who owned OpenOffice at the time) were bought by Oracle, many of the developers didn't like the situation so they created a "fork" in the form of LibreOffice. Oracle later passed OpenOffice on to the Apache Foundation. Development since then has been very limited, so (unlike LibreOffice) OpenOffice is now rather outdated.

 

There is a newer alternative (also free) in the form of OnlyOffice Desktop Editors (to give it its full name). This has slightly better compatibility with MS Word etc.

[J. S. Bach]

I use Apache OpenOffice which is free. When I starting using it I also ran LibreOffice at the same time and found that I preferred Apache as it seemed (to me at least) a bit more user-friendly; or maybe it replicated the word processor that I had to use at work more closely than Libre did. My favorite w/p was Word Perfect but the IT folks ended up going with the MS product line.

 

As an aside, the county's system had around 8,000 computers and mine was probably the only one still running Lotus 123 as GFI's Network Manager (the bus farebox software) only outputted the data in Lotus format.

[melmerby]

Another Libre Office user here.

I used to have Open Office, but as has been mentioned it's become rather old hat and LO is updated frequently.

LO is so useful I have also sent a donation (or two) to help with the development.*

 

I still have Lotus Smartsuite Millenium Edition (I paid £20 for it new , years ago) which still works fine on Win 11, as long as you just use the individual apps.

The database is much simpler to use than LO's, many features of which I have no use for.

I've still got a copy of MS Word 2000, which also works on Win 10/11

 

*I've done that with a few 'free' programs that I use a lot, such as Warwickshire Railways.

Edited January 26, 2023 by melmerby

[melmerby]

15 minutes ago, J. S. Bach said:

My favorite w/p was Word Perfect

Last time I had that was with version 6 which was still a DOS program but with a Windows style GUI. It replaced IIRC Word Perfect 5.1 which was pretty well an industry standard, along with dBase and 123. I replaced it with Lotus Smartsuite 3 on Windows 3.1

 

Prior to that I had used, at work, Wordstar on an Apple IIe. (with all those inserted into text, printer control characters ☹️)

Edited January 26, 2023 by melmerby

[rab]

A satisfied Google Docs user here.

[Quarryscapes]

Libre Office is more current and closer matches the more recent Microsoft Office products. Open Office is still available which is closer to Office 97/ Office 2000 which I much prefer. We use regular office at work, but I steadfastly refuse to use it and work in Open Office. Nobody else on site has actually noticed that I don't send them Excel or Word documents but ODT and ODS files. Occasionally some formatting goes awry but it's usually an easy and quick fix. 

[J. S. Bach]

1 hour ago, melmerby said:

 ...snip... Windows 3.1 ...snip...

I had 3.11 for workgroups. It never crashed; probably the most stable of the Windows with XP close behind.

[melmerby]

1 hour ago, J. S. Bach said:

I had 3.11 for workgroups. It never crashed; probably the most stable of the Windows with XP close behind.

I didn't have much problem with 3.1.

The worst by a long way was 97, crash, crash, crash. It was so bad I bought a utility called "Crash Guard". It made it even worse 😒, so I had too remove it.

The best, for me up until 7 & 10, was XP SR2, the original was a bit flaky but by the time it was superceded it was pretty good.

[daryll]

For my job (self employed) I use office 365 I use excel , word, PowerPoint , publisher , and of course outlook , but on my home laptop ( and other PC) i use Libre Office,which is as IMHO just as good

Daryll

[John M Upton]

Although I do have the current Office 365 version of Word and Excel for which I reluctantly stump up a annual subscription as I have not found out a way out of it, I still have tucked away a copy of Office 97 and 2003, some functions of which are far better to use than the current overspeced and over engineered version.

[Damo666]

6 hours ago, melmerby said:

Last time I had that was with version 6 which was still a DOS program but with a Windows style GUI. It replaced IIRC Word Perfect 5.1 which was pretty well an industry standard, along with dBase and 123. I replaced it with Lotus Smartsuite 3 on Windows 3.1

 

Prior to that I had used, at work, Wordstar on an Apple IIe. (with all those inserted into text, printer control characters ☹️)

OOOTopic

First word processor I used was for the BBC Micro. Think that was simply called 'Word' (I'm visualising the EPROM it was installed on).

 

Apologies for the OT, now back on course.......

[melmerby]

23 minutes ago, Damo666 said:

OOOTopic

First word processor I used was for the BBC Micro. Think that was simply called 'Word' (I'm visualising the EPROM it was installed on).

 

 

Still OT

I think you will find it was View, which was accompanied by Viewsheet for spreadsheets

I had those, as well as Wordwise, later Wordwise Plus. (Then Interword)

 

Back to Windows PCs.........

 

 

Edited January 26, 2023 by melmerby

[MJI]

I liked Wordstar, but put the windows version on and tried that, set coulours up like the late DOS versions and.....

 

It printed out funny, not in black on white paper, but white writing on dark grey background.

 

WYSIWYG is pretty horrible comparing monitors to paper. This is when I found that since Windows you have to crank monitor brightness down a LOT compared to DOS usage.