Office 2003 replaced by Libre Office

[jcr1]

I've been using MS Office for many years now and really do like it - particularly excel. Great for what if scenarios and budgets, I like to do. Not to mention rosters etc for Maureen's voluntary work.
So all-in-all it's been a pretty essential tool for me.

I bought Office 2003, in 2004 and since then I've installed on 2 laptops (when one replaced the other), plus on 2 desktop machines and now on my 3rd pc ie one after the other, as one replaced the other. When I went to register the latest install, I got a message that it's been installed too often, when I tried to use the phone registration, I got the message, 2003 is no longer able to be registered by phone. Apparently support is no longer available - fair enough, I guess - that's their business, just a pain for me.
The other thing is, if, when the prompt to register came up, by hitting the "cancel" button, everything just continued as normal, for a few days, then it turned into a "read only" scenario.
I looked on-line and while the product is not as hideously priced as it once was, it's still annoying to have to fork out for a lot of features I won't need (I'm not running a big corporate here).

Anyway, I'm dead set against paying a subscription, which is one of the options; great for their cash flow, just another expense for me to factor in.

So, I downloaded Libre Office. So far, wouldn't know the difference.

Anyone else done this? I'd be interested in hearing how good/bad it's been.

[wainuitech]

kingsoft-office-freeware


With MS office theres two versions, the subscription Office 365 or buy it Office 2013, the subscription is cheaper overall if using on 5 PC's, its the PRO version which has everything. BUT you have to have W7 or 8 to use 2013.

[Agent_24]

I ditched MS Office a long time ago and switched to OpenOffice, then more recently, LibreOffice.

Admittedly I don't use office programs much to begin with, so I can't comment on the more advanced features, but I have had no problems with it so far, except that opening some MS Word documents don't look exactly how they would in MS Word, but they're still usable so I don't care.

[Nick G]

Libre office is pretty good when comparing Word vs Writer. I've found that MS Excel is slightly nicer, although I can live with using Calc. But, Base is useless, and far beyond Access in terms of capability + UI.

If you're replacing 2003, I'd say Libreoffice would be a good choice.

[jcr1]

Thanks for those comments guys
I've installed Kingsoft and I find that the spreadsheet is very like Excel, although not quite as polished; but I could live with that.
Now, just have to see if I can go "cold turkey" on Excel. Although, in saying that, the latest versions seem pretty alien.....so maybe now is the right time to change

[jcr1]

I just found this review http://www.techsupportalert.com/best...fice-suite.htm
It mentions Kingsoft as being as close as it gets to Office 2003.

[gary67]

MS office on my desktop Kingsoft on my netbook

[Pete B.]

In my opinion, the main reasons why users still buy - or rent - an expensive Microsoft Office are:

1) Word (doc, docx), Excel (xls, xlsx), and PowerPoint (ppt, pptx) represent the global standard office formats, and users are afraid, they can't handle these formats perfectly with an alternative office suite If there was an alternative office suite with 100% interoperability, many users would switch to this.

2) Idleness. Since MSO was / is the standard office suite which most users privately and / or professionally used to work with, they prefer sticking to the "original" insted of dealing with a completely different structure, interface, and other functionalities.

I played around with several alternative office suites, but neither LibreOffice, nor Google Docs, Kingsoft, Calligra, nor OpenOffice etc. can completely convince (former) MSO users in these two points.

Ultimately, I encountered SoftMaker Office, an office suite from a small German developer, and everyone who wants to switch from MSO to an alternative, but however, has not done it yet because of the two points above, should definitely try it out:

1) The compatibility is not perfect (that's not possible) but close to that, I have thousands of MSO documents, sheets, and a few presentations, plus I used Outlook - all of my files can be used seamlessly in both directions without formatting loss, and eM Client 6 Professional, which is included in SoftMaker Office Pro,replaces Outlook very well.

2) Interface is similar / familiar to that of MS Office 2003 (no ribbons), with several modern extensions such as tabs for multiple pages, navigation bar etc., so there's not too much of a learning curve.

However, I prefer it for many reasons compared to LibreOffice: SoftMaker Office has a cleaner and more attractive user interface than LibreOffice. Coding is tight, and program is small and runs very fast. It consumes less resources. It renders on-screen fonts much better, and has an excellent interoperability with Microsoft Office formats (never had any problems going back and forth). No quirks and oddities so far (which came across quite often in LibreOffice).

Price is reasonable at ~$99 for three licenses, upgrades from earlier versions ~$40. A free 30 day trial download is available. Have a look.

[johnd]

In my opinion, the main reasons why users still buy - or rent - an expensive Microsoft Office are:

1) Word (doc, docx), Excel (xls, xlsx), and PowerPoint (ppt, pptx) represent the global standard office formats,.....

I basically agree except for a minor point - the above should read ..."global defacto standard ...". The odt document format was accepted as an international standard I think 2 years before docx and there was some considerable deliberation about whether or not MS should have to use the odt standard as it's default instead of a new standard being approved.

I have used OpenOffice (and now LibreOffice) for probably 14 years or so mainly because I work cross platform (MS Windows and Linux). I think that the file format you save in is important for the long term survival of your files (i.e. I think it is important to use an open document format that is an international standard). Interestingly a number of European Governments think the same (see https://www.eionet.europa.eu/software/opendocument).

[Agent_24]

I was quite happy to see that the library uses GIMP and OpenOffice on their public machines.