I purchased a new laptop today from Costco.

I really need Word but not necessarily all of Microsoft Office, although I do think I should get it all as I do occasionally need Excel.

Costco offers 2 ways to get Microsoft Office. For $89 I can get 15 months of service. I think that's sort of a rental thing. For approximately $125 they said I can actually purchase the, IIRC, the Home or Student Version for $125-ish.

Is one better than the other? Pro's and Con's?

I'm on a pretty tight budget right now, paying cash/debit and no charge cards.

Should I look for MS Office someplace else?

BTW it's a Lenovo IdeaPad S340. Seems to be a lot of bang for the buck.

Thanks in advance.

I'd recommend you try LibreOffice and see if you need anything beyond that. It's free.

I've used LibreOffice at work and home to edit Microsoft Office documents from Word, Excel, and more for many years. No issues about features or compatibility.

You can get 100% compatibility with LibreOffice for free so why buy Office?

Then there's this: https://arstechnica.com/inform...rosoft-office-again/

If you care about this sort of thing.

I'd be happy to save $100-ish bucks.

So I can use what you suggested and not have any troubles? Is it really that good?

It's free. You have nothing to lose trying it.

LibreOffice is your friend.

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quote:

Originally posted by OKCGene:
I'd be happy to save $100-ish bucks.

So I can use what you suggested and not have any troubles? Is it really that good?

I recently read a similar thread about LibreOffice and thought I'd see for myself just how good and/or compatible with MS Office it was. After playing with it, I'd say its a good replacement for MS Office with the observation that a few menu items are not in the same menu locations in LibreOffice as in MS Word or Excel. Certainly not a big issue. It opened and modified my Office files without any issues.

For the most part libre office is fine.
But it is not 100% compatible.
Document formatting, layout, and paragraphnumbering are problematic.
Used it for years but finally got feed up with having to figure out ways to "trick" it to do what i wanted.

https://www.openoffice.org/download/index.html

"Apache Open Office", it's free and works well. Open Office is kinda just like Microsoft office.

The one compelling feature of MS Office for me was VBA. Well now that MS wants that to go away in favor of VB .NET or C#, I don't see any reason not to use LibreOffice. It irks me the way the world gauges interoperability as compatibility with MS Office. It's too bad that ISO 29500 strict isn't the standard by which compatibility is measured instead of the bastardized OOXML that MS forces on us.

I'm a fan of Openoffice. I've been using NeoOffice on the Mac for a decade now, and it works just fine. There's no reason not to give it a try.

It you’re a veteran you can buy the license at the online exchange for $69. I bought it on sale there for $29 a while back.

I use openoffice all the time. Works great and seamlessly goes between my Microsoft work computer and my personal laptop.

OpenOffice and LibreOffice are like branches on a tree that has the same roots.

Either one should do the job for you, just fine.

I use LibreOffice; it handles MicroSoft Office files with no problem.

As stated, menu items might not be in the same place, but the manual (online) will tell you what you need to know.

As a bonus, LibreOffice is available in versions for Mac (which I use), Windows, and Linux.

It is totally free -- FREE! No need to purchase anything. There are entrepreneurs who load it onto a disk or USB stick and sell it on Amazon and eBay, but there is no need to buy it that way, a download is simple enough.

Give it a try before you spend money with MicroSoft. You have nothing to lose. Any data files or documents that you create can be saved in MicroSoft format, so if you later decide that you really want to give your money to MicroSoft, you have not lost anything.

quote:

Originally posted by mrvmax:

It you’re a veteran you can buy the license at the online exchange for $69. I bought it on sale there for $29 a while back.

Tell me about the online exchange, please. If you do not want to publish the information here, my email address is in my profile.

i was looking to purchase ms word separately, and openoffice was suggested. works fine creating letters, and modifying / editing existing *.doc word docs.

If you signup for their free MS cloud service you get all their Office apps for free. They are web based though.

Otherwise, LibreOffice is good.

I would try the LibreOffice unless you're collaborating with other users that use the real deal. Two years ago I was working on a project where one of the team members were using Libre. His edits of the document had a tendency to format the document wrong. On the other hand I'm using Office 365, and really like it. It is "renting" the software but I don't have formatting issues with my team members.

It really is a choice of rent vs own (O365 vs pkg product).
Own is much cheaper version time.
O365 will always entitle the latest version.
Home/Student does not have Outlook.
The optimal version I install mostly for clients is Home/Business.
But for word only then Home/Student is fine.