Alternative to Microsoft Office, affordable for Students?
 

Hello,

Microsoft Office allows 1 to 5 licences in a package, or more. It may unfortunately cost about ~180-200Eur for the whole MS office package. The cheapest cost about ~60Eur. The solution for one year, one licence, is about 60€. Well, might be expensive still to pay each year so much.

Which alternative office software to Microsoft Office would you know?

The minimum needs would be to suit well home use, students and small companies. The software that might be of prior importance are Word/Write, Spreadsheet and Presentation with Powerpoint. Probably, Google Doc is not your favorite way of working, you may need to work locally on your disk.

The interest is to have a software comfortable to use and with a look similar to MS Office 2003 (or higher).

You are looking for cost - efficient alternative solution for Microsoft Office, which will bring you compatibility and performance? - Hopefully, some solutions may exist.

Please feel free to post a link with nice alternative on Linux, Windows and Mac.

[1] Openoffice / Libreoffice : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice
http://www.openoffice.org/ supported/made by Apache, which is coded mostly on Java and C++.

[2] Word Perfect (C++) about 70€

[3] Libreoffice write (Java/C++)

[4] Abiword (open, Linux)

Hopefully, there are more ??

There is also KDE's Calligra Suite. It's a little different but if it matches your style, it's great.

If your students are doing mathematics, physics, or other hard sciences then LaTeX is probably the way to go. Same for non-scientific fields heavy on formulas, even cargo-cult stuff like economics.

Aside from LaTeX, the most important thing to look for is full and proper OpenDocument Format support. Unfortunately M$ does not fully support it -- yet -- and the failure is intentional on their part. Thus exchanging documents with legacy users can be problematic. However, nothing technical stops them from installing LibreOffice or similar parallel to any incompatible legacy systems. I write "yet" there because it is only a matter of time before even M$ has to offer full support to remain relevant. There's pretty much consensus on that, but the open question is how long it will take to force them into compliance.

Edit: With compatible file formats, there is no longer a requirement that authors use the same software to collaborate. One part of the team can comfortably use Calligra while the other part uses LibreOffice, for example.

Hi!

Please check: WPS Office

Most probably this wikipage is what you search for.

Cheers

Dirk

aah, it's you again, the author of gems like

Better Free Software Alternative to Linux, really FREE ?
Recommendation for best online shop to buy Windows 7 ?
Office Work needs MS Windows, not Linux.
Shall UBUNTU be banned by Linux & Linus?

etc. etc. (31 threads with mostly similar titles started only this year)

bored? out to get another reaction out of people? well not from me this time.

I've used OpenOffice (or LibreOffice, a "fork" of it) for years. My word-processing requirements are straightforward but this package is extremely thorough and complete.

bored? out to get another reaction out of people? well not from me this time...

Ability requires some basic Microsoft DLLs - MFC, Visual C++ runtime, DAO/JET. Before Ability can be installed, these DLLs must be installed. They can be downloaded here:
http://www.ability.com/download4/mfc/MFCSetup.MSI
http://www.ability.com/download4/jet/JetSetup.exe

And to install:
Many Thanks!! It works with Wine + Ability Version 7 ! herewith a screenshot
wine-1.6.2

I don't understand this thread:
If you need* Microsoft Office you need Microsoft Office. You can usually get a student discount so it's around €50 or under -- I'm sure I've seen "introductory" offers for much less, There are also things like the partners plan thing (can't recall the name) where an organisation can let their employees have a very discounted copy of Office (around €15 last time I looked.
If you don't need Microsoft Office then just use Libre Office, you're really not going to get anything "better" overall.



*If one of your courses is "advanced Macros for Excel" or similar.

The cheapest was about 60€ for one year max. / and one PC.