Clone of Micosoft Office

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I recently bought a laptop that doesn't have Microsoft Office. I don't want to spend the high price of the package for the home, and wonder whether a free clone of the package is safe and effective. I particularly need the Excell and Word clone counterparts.

Thanks for your help.

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Type: Question • Score: 9 • Views: 16,664 • Replies: 16

[+6] - McGentrix - 10/07/2013http://www.openoffice.org/

http://www.openoffice.org/

1 Reply

@McGentrix,

I heard of the site. Do you have any experience with it, or heard some details on safety and effectiveness? When someone sends me an attachment in "Word," will I be able to open it using the site's program?

Thanks!

3 Replies

@Advocate,

It is the current best in class free alternative to MS Office. Many schools and offices use it as an alternative and so far as I know, there are very few occasions in which there is any problems with interactions between the two.

0 Replies

@Advocate,

Yes it will open and be able to save the latest Word docx documents.

There might be some issues if you need to use macros or VBA but the document should format and save just fine.

0 Replies

@Advocate,

McGentrix is correct. OpenOffice is the solution. I use it all the time and it has all the necessary functionality of MSOffice for free. Highly recommended.

0 Replies

@Advocate,

Advocate wrote:

I heard of the site. Do you have any experience with it, or heard some details on safety and effectiveness?

I'm using it for day-to-day work. It's no more likely to catch a virus than MS Office is, and I can type letters in one just as fast as in the other. Spreadsheets, too, are limited only by my ability to write them correctly. But in fairness, programmers who have written extensive Basic scripts for those spreadsheets report that Open Office scripts slow down somewhat earlier than Microsoft Office scripts.

Advocate wrote:

When someone sends me an attachment in "Word," will I be able to open it using the site's program?

Basically yes. I'm hedging a bit because documents with lots of macros might run into portability problems. But your typical letter, business memo, masters thesis etc will work just fine.

2 Replies

Thanks to all of you for the help.

Ad

0 Replies

@Thomas,

Thomas wrote:

It's no more likely to catch a virus than MS Office is

It's not applications (MS Office, OpenOffice) that catch viruses, it's operating systems (MS Windows, Mac OS) and they aren't just floating about like actual viruses, the computer user has to do actually click on something unsafe or visit a dangerous website, and neglect their antivirus precautions.

1 Reply

Sometimes it's the small things in life that make the daily struggle worthwhile.. great site@!!

0 Replies

@contrex,

Office files can catch viruses.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macro_virus

1 Reply

@parados,

parados wrote:

Office files can catch viruses.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macro_virus

Office files don't "catch" viruses. If an Office file contains malicious code it is because somebody deliberately put it there. I wish some other word than "virus" had become popular because it makes many people think that their computer, or the files on it, can somehow catch a virus like a person catches a cold.

1 Reply

@contrex,

There are Office viruses that search out other office documents and insert the virus macros in them. Some only infect other open documents, others actually search for saved documents to infect.

0 Replies

MS Office macro viruses were much more common around 10 to 12 years ago than they are now. To actually be infected, you’d have to download a file containing a malicious macro and go out of your way to disable Office’s built-in security features. As a result of this, macro viruses are now much less common.

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@Thomas,

LibreOffice is a very good alternative as well (When Open Office got "commercialised", the developers founded LibreOffice)

http://www.libreoffice.org/international-sites/

Quote:

As of July 2013 the advisory board of [url]=ttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Document_Foundation]The Document Foundation[/url] has 11 members: AMD, Google, Red Hat, SUSE, Intel, Lanedo, King Abdulaziz City of Science and Technology (KACST), Inter-Ministry Mutualisation for an Open Productivity Suite (MIMO), Free Software Foundation (FSF), Software in the Public Interest, and Freies Office Deutschland e.V

Clone of Micosoft Office

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