MS Office

If you're a college student, you can get it for free from the university.
 
With the quality of Open Source alternatives like LibreOffice or OpenOffice these days I can't see why you'd need to look anywhere else if you want a free productivity suite... If you want to keep it cheap and legit that's the way to go (unless as said above you are entitled to free MS Office via school or college).
 
heatlesssun said:
Not free but $10 if you have an email address that works. And it's not a subscription but the whole 2013 Pro suite. http://www.microsofthup.com/hupus/home.aspx?culture=en-US
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Unfortunately, that only works if you're employed by a company enrolled in that program.

brncao said:
If you're a college student, you can get it for free from the university.
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That, unfortunately, depends on whether or not the university in question has decided to foot the bill for you. Plenty of universities don't do this.
 
davethetekkie said:
With the quality of Open Source alternatives like LibreOffice or OpenOffice these days I can't see why you'd need to look anywhere else if you want a free productivity suite... If you want to keep it cheap and legit that's the way to go (unless as said above you are entitled to free MS Office via school or college).
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LOL open office is a POS. I tried installing that on 2 of our users laptops and both of them would lock up/blue screen randomly when using it. 2 different Lenovo models running win7, with a fresh OS image.
 
Biznatch said:
LOL open office is a POS. I tried installing that on 2 of our users laptops and both of them would lock up/blue screen randomly when using it. 2 different Lenovo models running win7, with a fresh OS image.
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As opposed Office where just recently I tried installing a STAND ALONE Office 2010/2013 product on top of an existing 2007 install and it would refuse to do so because I didn't have the Office 2010 or Office 2013 pre-existing files needed to work. Microsoft has been pulling this sleazy kind of business for a long time now.

Microsoft may have a one up on certain programs: Access, Visio, or Excel, but they come with their own shenanigans.
 
Liger88 said:
As opposed Office where just recently I tried installing a STAND ALONE Office 2010/2013 product on top of an existing 2007 install and it would refuse to do so because I didn't have the Office 2010 or Office 2013 pre-existing files needed to work. Microsoft has been pulling this sleazy kind of business for a long time now.

Microsoft may have a one up on certain programs: Access, Visio, or Excel, but they come with their own shenanigans.
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You normally have to uninstall all parts of a prior version of Office before installing a new one. I think there are ways to mix and match versions of certain things like OneNote.
 
Biznatch said:
LOL open office is a POS. I tried installing that on 2 of our users laptops and both of them would lock up/blue screen randomly when using it. 2 different Lenovo models running win7, with a fresh OS image.
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Odd. I use MS Office 99.9% of the time. The other times I've recommended Open Office and have installed it for several users (their personal machines, not work machines where we are 100% Office). Never had an issue. Probably 20+ installs of Open Office.

If you are just using a simple word processor or spreadsheet, Open Office is fine, free and easy to use. If you really need MS Office, Microsoft has a $6.99/month subscription model. Not free, but not too expensive, either. Other than that, to be legit - Work might have it, School gets discounts or free, or pay. No real free ways to get it.
 
I had problems using OpenOffice. When I took a college class in late 2012, the instructor would send us .doc files with the assignments on them. I'd load it in OpenOffice, work on it, save it, submit it.

It turns out, OpenOffice was "dropping" some images from the source .doc, so I wasn't aware of them, so I wasn't doing the assignment properly. I was lucky after a few weeks I saw someone else's assignment and noticed I was missing stuff. Switched to Office 2013 and that problem ceased.
 
davethetekkie said:
With the quality of Open Source alternatives like LibreOffice or OpenOffice these days...
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Granted, it's difficult to complain about quality when something doesn't cost you anything....But I think quality in these applications is definitely not up to par with Microsoft Office. Specifically, I've never really found anything positive about Apache OpenOffice....I think they spent too long trying to revive the original OpenOffice codebase when LibreOffice had already forked and matured.

Considering how much better and more polished LibreOffice is than OpenOffice, I'm not sure why people bother continuing the OpenOffice project. It probably has something to do with licensing. LibreOffice is LGPL v3 while OpenOffice is Apache 2.0, and seeing how the open source community like's to have idiotic, irrational (you could even say religious) jihads/civil wars over minute differences in licensing details, that's all it would really take to have two redundant projects.

I'm convinced that if LibreOffice and OpenOffice weren't forks and instead all of the development resources possessed by these to projects were devoted to one single project, we might actually have an office suite on the same level as Microsoft Office.
 
Office Online is totally free: https://www.office.com/start/default.aspx

Just sign in with your Microsoft Account (Live ID) and you get the following services:
- 7+ GB of cloud storage (OneDirve)
- Email inbox (Outlook)
- Online versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote
- Oneline calendar
- Online contacts
- Desktop version of OneNote
 
Unknown-One said:
Office Online is totally free: https://www.office.com/start/default.aspx

Just sign in with your Microsoft Account (Live ID) and you get the following services:
- 7+ GB of cloud storage (OneDirve)
- Email inbox (Outlook)
- Online versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote
- Oneline calendar
- Online contacts
- Desktop version of OneNote
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They've had that for years to compete with Google Docs. It's a very cut down version, just like Google Docs, but it is actually fairly helpful especially with students or working with groups. Unfortunately, a lot of the fancier stuff is missing and ultimately will force you to rely on a beefier application.

Great for what they are though.
 
Biznatch said:
LOL open office is a POS. I tried installing that on 2 of our users laptops and both of them would lock up/blue screen randomly when using it. 2 different Lenovo models running win7, with a fresh OS image.
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Hahaha what a joke. Your OS installation or hardware was faulty then. OOO does not produce any bluescreens.

There's no sense whatsoever to pay for MS office especially now that its mutilated by the horrible ribbbon interface.
 
Dogs said:
Granted, it's difficult to complain about quality when something doesn't cost you anything....But I think quality in these applications is definitely not up to par with Microsoft Office. Specifically, I've never really found anything positive about Apache OpenOffice....I think they spent too long trying to revive the original OpenOffice codebase when LibreOffice had already forked and matured.

Considering how much better and more polished LibreOffice is than OpenOffice, I'm not sure why people bother continuing the OpenOffice project. It probably has something to do with licensing. LibreOffice is LGPL v3 while OpenOffice is Apache 2.0, and seeing how the open source community like's to have idiotic, irrational (you could even say religious) jihads/civil wars over minute differences in licensing details, that's all it would really take to have two redundant projects.

I'm convinced that if LibreOffice and OpenOffice weren't forks and instead all of the development resources possessed by these to projects were devoted to one single project, we might actually have an office suite on the same level as Microsoft Office.
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99.9% of average Joes never use more than 10% of the functionality of Excel, Word etc. and for these people libre or openoffice will work without any problems. Only the more advanced users will probably prefer the actual office where stuff works how they're used to it working.
 
B00nie said:
Hahaha what a joke. Your OS installation or hardware was faulty then. OOO does not produce any bluescreens.

There's no sense whatsoever to pay for MS office especially now that its mutilated by the horrible ribbbon interface.
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Lenovo T400 and T420, both with a fresh WIN7 pro install, and running pretty much nothing else. Both machines would lockup/bluescreen and all the users were trying to do is edit excel files for expense reports. Removed open office and the problems went away.

MS office kicks the absolute shit out of open office, whether you like the ribbon or not. So feel free to use OO because you don't want to pay developers for their work, that's fine. But just because it works for you with no issues, doesn't mean that applies to anyone else.....
 
B00nie said:
99.9% of average Joes never use more than 10% of the functionality of Excel, Word etc. and for these people libre or openoffice will work without any problems. Only the more advanced users will probably prefer the actual office where stuff works how they're used to it working.
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It's not just a matter of how much functionality one uses. What's far more important is the value of the content that one creates and maintains. People are too quick to look at the only cost of a piece of software or a service but not the value the artifacts derived from using these things. If one's content is of little to no value then it makes no sense to spend much money on solutions to create this content. On the other hand, if the content is of high value like the primary artifacts of one's job or education then is makes little sense to save a few bucks on the by far and away the leading in nearly industry standard tools for content creation.

The reason why Office has done well over the years in spite of free alternatives is that there are millions of businesses and individuals around the globe whose content is their lifeblood. Saving a few bucks is always nice but the savings relative to the value of the content is virtually nill.
 
B00nie said:
99.9% of average Joes never use more than 10% of the functionality of Excel, Word etc. and for these people libre or openoffice will work without any problems. Only the more advanced users will probably prefer the actual office where stuff works how they're used to it working.
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99.9% of unemployed average Joes, maybe. Real people, on the other hand, are generally much more expensive than software. If the cost of Microsoft Office license is less than what I pay even my least expensive employees in a day, I'm not going to compromise productivity by giving them an inferior product. People can be trained to handle 'different' software, but no amount of training can make up for inefficient software, which is exactly what open office is. It's 2014, and productivity software has become, well, more productive, so it would make little sense to issue users a product which resembles an 11 year old version of the software it's trying to be an alternative to.

In the business world, the cost of Microsoft Office is nothing and its benefits are everything. And since most people are going to walk into Best Buy and purchase a computer that already has the software they use at work (Microsoft Office) anyways, nobody really has time to re-learn how to use an outdated productivity suite. It's not economical.
 
Tawnos said:
You can side by side install Office 2007, 2010, and 2013, just not Outlook (because it relies on a user-level file).

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929992
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This is true, except in my case in-particular I couldn't install a stand-alone product (Project 2010/2013 or Visio 2010/2013) on an existing Office 2007 install. No way I'm paying to upgrade what works just fine. Interestingly enough because it was MSDN it would install just fine on my laptop without Office, so I'm not sure exactly what the case is. Could just be a strange issue for me.
 
Biznatch said:
Lenovo T400 and T420, both with a fresh WIN7 pro install, and running pretty much nothing else. Both machines would lockup/bluescreen and all the users were trying to do is edit excel files for expense reports. Removed open office and the problems went away.

MS office kicks the absolute shit out of open office, whether you like the ribbon or not. So feel free to use OO because you don't want to pay developers for their work, that's fine. But just because it works for you with no issues, doesn't mean that applies to anyone else.....
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It makes no sense whatsoever that OOO could in any imaginable way BLUESCREEN your system. It's not a driver, it doesn't touch your system. You have some other problem in your computers.
 
heatlesssun said:
It's not just a matter of how much functionality one uses. What's far more important is the value of the content that one creates and maintains. People are too quick to look at the only cost of a piece of software or a service but not the value the artifacts derived from using these things. If one's content is of little to no value then it makes no sense to spend much money on solutions to create this content. On the other hand, if the content is of high value like the primary artifacts of one's job or education then is makes little sense to save a few bucks on the by far and away the leading in nearly industry standard tools for content creation.

The reason why Office has done well over the years in spite of free alternatives is that there are millions of businesses and individuals around the globe whose content is their lifeblood. Saving a few bucks is always nice but the savings relative to the value of the content is virtually nill.
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The only reason people continue to pay for Office is that they don't know about the free alternatives that can do exactly the same job. For work users the biggest obstacle for moving is that OOO/Libreoffice works a bit differently in certain places and people are annoyed by change. Oh, and the company pays their licenses.
 
Dogs said:
99.9% of unemployed average Joes, maybe. Real people, on the other hand, are generally much more expensive than software. If the cost of Microsoft Office license is less than what I pay even my least expensive employees in a day, I'm not going to compromise productivity by giving them an inferior product. People can be trained to handle 'different' software, but no amount of training can make up for inefficient software, which is exactly what open office is. It's 2014, and productivity software has become, well, more productive, so it would make little sense to issue users a product which resembles an 11 year old version of the software it's trying to be an alternative to.

In the business world, the cost of Microsoft Office is nothing and its benefits are everything. And since most people are going to walk into Best Buy and purchase a computer that already has the software they use at work (Microsoft Office) anyways, nobody really has time to re-learn how to use an outdated productivity suite. It's not economical.
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ROFL get a grip. Openoffice is probably much faster than trying to figure out which of the ghastly ribbon buttons did the job that you used to find in the handy menu. The ready built computers could save a bit of expense and include the free and perfectly working alternative. I haven't had MS Office installed in my work or home computers for several years and there's no situation where I would have missed it. I prefer to use Libreoffice instead of OSX:s Numbers for example.
 
B00nie said:
The only reason people continue to pay for Office is that they don't know about the free alternatives that can do exactly the same job.
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Except that they often can't do exactly the same job. If I mark up a Word document in pen the ink won't show in LibreOffice.

B00nie said:
For work users the biggest obstacle for moving is that OOO/Libreoffice works a bit differently in certain places and people are annoyed by change. Oh, and the company pays their licenses.
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Works a bit differently or completely differently depending on how one uses Office. You want to ignore the value of documents and say two things are very similar when that generalization means nothing without explicit conversion testing.
 
B00nie said:
Openoffice is probably much faster than trying to figure out which of the ghastly ribbon buttons did the job that you used to find in the handy menu.
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The ribbon is faster. If you can't handle it sorry, that's your problem, but normal people are more productive with the big-kids application than the 'I'm a college kid and can't afford a real office suite' open source product....which is why nearly every company uses Microsoft Office

B00nie said:
The ready built computers could save a bit of expense and include the free and perfectly working alternative.
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But why would they, when 1.) People are willing to pay for the superior product and actively seek out the computers which ship with it, 2.) It doesn't really save them much/any expense.

B00nie said:
I haven't had MS Office installed in my work or home computers for several years and there's no situation where I would have missed it. I prefer to use Libreoffice instead of OSX:s Numbers for example.
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Sure. I also saw a documentary where a Cornwall man preferred eating road-kill over fresh, sanitary meat. Normal people, on the other hand...

heatlesssun said:
Except that they often can't do exactly the same job. If I mark up a Word document in pen the ink won't show in LibreOffice.
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...and in heavily regulated industries with record retention requirements (such as banking, where all documents must be stored for 5 years), having content dropped because some of your employees were using Libre Office, which couldn't handle the document properly, could easily mean multi-million dollar fines and forfeitures. One fine will erase decades worth of licensing 'savings' from using 'free' Libre Office.
 
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Dogs said:
The ribbon is faster. If you can't handle it sorry, that's your problem, but normal people are more productive with the big-kids application than the 'I'm a college kid and can't afford a real office suite' open source product....which is why nearly every company uses Microsoft Office
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Microsoft makes a lot of mistakes but Microsoft's critics aren't infallible either. The ribbon has been in the last three versions of Office for 7 years now. All of the supposed enormous training costs, the mass exodus to other office suites, none of the doomsday scenarios occurred. And the same basic UI is used in the web version, the iPad version and the forthcoming modern Windows version and presumably Android tablet version. How can something be use for so long by so many people in so many products and not work well? The answer is that it isn't possible. The ribbon has been successfully added into Office and will continue to evolve for a while as it's now pretty much universal in the Office clients.
 
heatlesssun said:
Microsoft makes a lot of mistakes but Microsoft's critics aren't infallible either. The ribbon has been in the last three versions of Office for 7 years now. All of the supposed enormous training costs, the mass exodus to other office suites, none of the doomsday scenarios occurred. And the same basic UI is used in the web version, the iPad version and the forthcoming modern Windows version and presumably Android tablet version. How can something be use for so long by so many people in so many products and not work well? The answer is that it isn't possible. The ribbon has been successfully added into Office and will continue to evolve for a while as it's now pretty much universal in the Office clients.
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Nor would other applications adopt the ribbon model....If it were a mistake, it would probably not have spread beyond Microsoft.

AspenTech moved to the ribbon UI for AspenOne, and their big claim is that the new UI let's you do everything faster.
http://www.aspentech.com/_TwoColumnLayout.aspx?pageid=2147485187&id=15032386073

And they're just one example of many companies who have adopted the ribbon and not regressed back to the old UI.

As far as the critics go, I'd strongly urge against taking anything they have to say seriously. One of the articles from the building Windows 8 blog highlights some particularly noteworthy examples of critics and what they had to say about the computer mouse when that first hit the scene.

In fact, the mouse was a bit of a curiosity at the time, perceived by many experienced users as inefficient, cumbersome, un-ergonomic, and hard to learn how to use. The mouse was certainly exotic. Do you roll it on the screen? Do you pick it up and talk into it?

Here are a couple of published expert opinions from early 1980s print publications about whether the mouse would catch on:

“Mice are nice ideas, but of dubious value for business users” (George Vinall, PC Week, April 24, 1984)
“There is no evidence that people want to use these things.” (John C. Dvorak, San Francisco Examiner, February 19, 1984)
“I was having lots of fun, but in the back of my corporate mind, I couldn't help but think about productivity.” (George Vinall, PC Week, April 24, 1984)
“Does the mouse make the computer more accessible, more friendly, to certain target audiences such as executives? The answer is no.” (Computerworld, October 31, 1983)
“There is no possibility that this device will feel more comfortable to the executive than the keyboard. Because of its ‘rollability,’ the mouse has the aura of a gimmick…” (Computerworld, October 31, 1983)
“The mouse and its friends are merely diversions in this process. What sounds revolutionary does not necessarily help anyone with anything, and therein lies the true test of commercial longevity.” (David A. Kay, Datamation, October 1983)
So, as you can see, the mouse was considered gimmicky, unnecessary, and not useful for mainstream use.
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See: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/05/18/creating-the-windows-8-user-experience.aspx

...I think it's safe to say that most critics like to criticize anything that's different because it's easy to do, not because they have even the faintest clue what they're talking about. Technology critics are often impossibly stupid and usually downright wrong, so I don't know why we haven't stopped listening to them decades ago.
 
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B00nie said:
ROFL get a grip. Openoffice is probably much faster than trying to figure out which of the ghastly ribbon buttons did the job that you used to find in the handy menu.
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Already touched on, but really, if you haven't figure out the ribbon in the seven years it's been in Office, then.. I dunno. The ribbon has worked well enough that MS has it in Windows itself now, and even the Mac version of Office 2011 has a ribbon interface.

There are people entering the workforce in 2014 that have never seen Office without a ribbon.
 
Dogs said:
Nor would other applications adopt the ribbon model....If it were a mistake, it would probably not have spread beyond Microsoft.

AspenTech moved to the ribbon UI for AspenOne, and their big claim is that the new UI let's you do everything faster.
http://www.aspentech.com/_TwoColumnLayout.aspx?pageid=2147485187&id=15032386073

And they're just one example of many companies who have adopted the ribbon and not regressed back to the old UI.
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The latest PDF editor for Nuance, Power PDF Advanced, now incorporates a ribbon UI. As you say, how can this thing be so bad yet have been around for so long and even gain adoption in that time from 3rd parties?

Dogs said:
...I think it's safe to say that most critics like to criticize anything that's different because it's easy to do, not because they have even the faintest clue what they're talking about. Technology critics are often impossibly stupid and usually downright wrong, so I don't know why we haven't stopped listening to them decades ago.
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Totally agree. But the ribbon in Office is 7 years old, it's far from new. I'm just not sure what point ribbon opponents are trying to make this far into it.

SuperSubZero said:
There are people entering the workforce in 2014 that have never seen Office without a ribbon.
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And that number is only growing by the day. At this point putting the old drop down menus back would be as if not more problematic than going to the ribbon.
 
Liger88 said:
This is true, except in my case in-particular I couldn't install a stand-alone product (Project 2010/2013 or Visio 2010/2013) on an existing Office 2007 install. No way I'm paying to upgrade what works just fine. Interestingly enough because it was MSDN it would install just fine on my laptop without Office, so I'm not sure exactly what the case is. Could just be a strange issue for me.
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Not that it helps you but I do it the other way around , office 2010 stand alone visio 2007
 
You can try Office Starter for free. It has Word and Excel with stripped functionality. I hate all these office software suites and their compatibility issues.
 
We use adp billing software and office at work, so I got the 9.99 offer for 2010, but I have not
checked it for 2013 yet. I will check first thing in the morning and see if we can still get it. Thanks
to this thread for the reminder.
 
SoftMaker Office is really nice. You can buy their suite here: http://www.softmaker.com/english/ofw_en.htm or use their free alternative, FreeOffice. You need to use an email unfortunately though. I've tried LibreOffice. It's slow, bloated, uses crap Java, and sometimes doesn't install on clients PCs. I've had compatibility problems with LibreOffice, and it does some things I don't like.
 
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