I do not want any of that yearly subscription nonsense, so Office 365 is a no-go. I just need Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, so the “Home & Student” version works for me.
I remember students used to get decent discounts (and I do have a .edu email).
But all the “deals” I have found so far seem to be shady resold volume license keys.
Have you considered LibreOffice? It works with Microsoft Office file formats just fine.
If that doesn’t work for you, you could always use the free web version of Microsoft Office.
Last time I tried LibreOffice, the UI was awful on my Windows machine.
I switched to SoftMaker Office instead. It’s a bit clunky, but it looks good and works well.
Tabbed View works fairly well…
I’m sure it works fine, but within one second I spotted two sloppy UI issues: the top of the ruler marker is clipped, and the blue highlight on the alignment button looks way too similar to the gray font. I bet a UX expert could find even more.
On my display, scaling didn’t work right, so the fonts and icons just looked bad.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s an impressive piece of software, and I’ve got a ton of respect for the developers. It would be awesome to have a solid open-source replacement for paid apps, but the UI is so unpolished that it actually gets in the way.
SoftMaker Office is a subscription service? And a pricey one at that… but then again, Office 365 costs even more these days.
I just wish they had a non-commercial version or something—maybe limit it to 30 hours of use per month for a free version or something like that.
They offer FreeOffice, which is free, and also have a paid version.
Whats the difference, paid version has cloud support?
Are there any downsides for the average user compared to regular Office?
There might be a bit of a learning curve, especially with Calc, the Excel alternative. You might need to tweak your expectations a bit. It can open most Office documents, but sometimes you could run into formatting issues with Writer or Impress.
the compatibility of LibreOffice files with Microsoft Office users worries me. Although I don’t distribute files frequently, I have encountered compatibility problems in the past.
Usually, you can save LibreOffice files as MS Office formats like .doc, .docx, .ppt, .pptx, .xls, .xlsx, etc. Just make sure to embed fonts or use common ones like Arial or Times New Roman to avoid formatting issues.
Microsoft Office users should be able to open .odt and other OpenDocument files perfectly fine.
Sometimes, there are small display issues or incompatibilities, but you can’t have everything perfect.