An Office alternative

[TSR2]

Every so often a program comes along which might be quite useful. I'm pretty fortunate that I get my copy of the Microsoft Office products as part of my TechNet subscription, but buying MS Office is a very expensive business, increasingly so since Office 2013 has been released where you don't have the right to install the product on a different computer if your original one dies. So for those of you who might need MS Word or Excel from time to time, but certainly don't want to be paying several hundred pounds for the privilege, I've found LibreOffice 4.0 a great free alternative. It will handle the old style XLS and DOC files as well as the newer XLSX and DOCX files. Its well worth a look, and best of all, as its free, if you don't like it you can uninstall it.

http://www.libreoffice.org/download

LibreOffice Writer (text processing)
LibreOffice Calc (spreadsheets)
LibreOffice Impress (presentations)
LibreOffice Draw (drawing)
LibreOffice Base (database processing)
LibreOffice Math (formula editing)
LibreOffice Basic (programming using the Basic language)

Also, there is a handy 100MB version that you can run from a USB pen drive or similar without needing to "install" anything, which is very clever.

[petermcleland]

That looks very interesting Ben...I think I'll take a look at that. I see one of its Apps writes Basic code...Which Basic is it coded for? And does that version of Basic run on any PC?

[DaveB]

Thanks for a timely reminder Ben

I've been in need of Word on this PC recently (boring CV's ) and have had to revert to the laptop as I don't have it on this pc. Ian Hind suggested this to me last year I think. I took a look but never downloaded it. Think I will do now

ATB
DaveB

[speedbird591]

Thanks, Ben. I've been using Apache Open Office for a while which seems to do much the same and works as an alternative to Office. If anybody has experience of both perhaps they'd let me know if either has an advantage over the other.

When I'm on the move my iPad keyboard is very useable and I run Apple's 'Pages' word processor App which also creates Word documents.

There doesn't seem to be any need for a home user to bother with expensive Microsoft Office products any more, thankfully!

Ian

[TSR2]

The big plus for me over Open Office is that it doesn't have such a high dependence on Java. Java is a security disaster and while libre office does use it for more of its advanced programs such as its database program, most of the rest of it will quite happily run without Java.
With regards the type of BASIC it compiles, I haven't looked at that part yet Peter, but at a guess it will be one of the standard types without some of the fancy procedures, so it should run on pretty much anything that can run BASIC.

[AllanL]

OpenOffice was the "original" free equivalent to MS Office after it was made open source by Sun. Most of the development programmers moved on to LibreOffice when there was a difference of views over how Sun and Oracle - who bought Sun - were looking to develop the package. Apparently Oracle handed the package over to the Apache Software Foundation, which is how it came to be Apache OpenOffice.

Ed [Ben popped in and made the next comment bollox. ]

As Ben says there are a number of applications available at http://portableapps.com/apps which can sit on a memory stick and operate on any PC without any drivers being installed on the host machine. So I can run stuff on my work laptop without the IT Polizei getting in the way.

[ianhind]

I've recently moved to Office 2010 since I can buy a licence for about £10 since the company I work for have an agreement with Microsoft. If it wasn't for compatibility with what I use at work, I would otherwise have stayed with Office 2003. No real need for the latest version and a lot less painful than the ribbon interface. So I doubt I'll be going to Office 2013 for the next 10 years.

Nevertheless I do use Libre Office for the obscure reason that it reads and writes to mySQL databases. Also I import Word and Excel files when they have "problems" to clean them up before sending them back to the Microsoft programs.

Pity there were two forks from Open Office (Libre and Apache) since they could have combined resources.

Ian

[alemaobaiano]

We've used 3.5 at work for some time now, mainly because it can support spell checking in multiple languages. MS expect you to buy additional language packs if you need to spell check away from your regional version. Initially we had some problems with importing Excel spreadsheets but that was quite easily overcome with a quick rework.

TTFN

[speedbird591]

Looks good. I'll download it and replace Open Office. Thanks for the comparisons.

Ian