I just bought a Mac, and I need a word processing program for school. I was going to buy Microsoft Word for Mac, but it’s pricey. My friend told me about Open Office and how it was free to download and use. I checked out the website, and I couldn’t tell enough about it to decide whether I should ditch the Microsoft Word idea altogether, or if I should just stick with Word. I am a writer, and I have quite a few documents from Word that I would like to be able to access with my computer. I’d like to know if Open Office will be able to run the documents fine. If you could maybe tell me what you think about the Open Office programs, and how comparable it is to Microsoft Word…that would be great. I don’t want to spend $300 if I don’t have to.

Answer:
Ask yourself this? What are you going to use word for? Are you going to do mail merges and other random stuff. Or are you going to write, bold, position, etc stuff. If you answered the second part like 99% of the rest of the world, then open office is as powerful a word processor as you need. It can read and save in microsoft word format, so your documents will not be lost. It will not disappoint you. Of course there will be a few differences from word that you’ll have to get used to, but it can do every basic thing that any average person would do with word without a hitch. It is powerful enough that i question why anyone even buys word anymore. Openoffice can probably do about 90% what word does (keep in mind the average person only uses about 3% of words features), yet everyone thinks that it must suck because it is free and open source. Get openoffice and spend the $300 buying yourself something nice And actually, since word 2007 now has support for ODF (Open Document Format, which open office uses by default), you can save normally with openoffice and it will be read by word 2007. However, for word 2005 or lower you will have to save as a .doc, which openoffice can also do.

Comments are closed.