Winner by TKO!

Anything Adobe

I got my copy through the home use program. Most universities and many employers participate. Gives you two free installs for really cheap (I want to say I paid $10?)





ETA: I hardly ever use it these days. I have since switched to LaTex. If you have to type of math, switch to LaTex and never look back.

 

Fuck no.

You'll need a gun and a whole army of men to get my beloved Excel away from me.

Yeah seriously. Fuck Libre shit. I had that shit briefly at work. It sucked so hard I asked if I could pay for my own copy of Office to use at the company.

why fix it.
I have both 2010 and 2013 as stand alone non subscription versions of office.

Creative Cloud. http://www.adobe.com/creativecloud.html

All Adobe licensing is now SAAS. You will need to maintain an active subscription for each user.

Adobe Licensing is relatively easy to manage and cheap per seat for what you're getting.

OP,  why don't you try Kingsoft office.  It is free.  Kind of like Openoffice.  

http://www.kingsoftstore.com/software/kingsoft-office-freeware

I use it instead of MS office, and have for several years now on my desktop.  My laptop has the real MS office and I can go back and forth to worth on things if I need.  It actually has been modeled to look like an older version of MS Office and is pretty close, but not exact.

Stop giving money to Microsoft.  Get open office or some such freeware that does everything word does.

I'm on your side OP. Fuck subscription based software. I won't buy it. I still use office 2003 or something like that. If I can't buy it and keep using it, I won't buy it.

I use it as well and recommend it to everybody.  It works fine with .doc, .xls, and other file types.

But compatibility with .docx, .xlsx, etc is incredibly shitty.  Graphics and equations get broken, layouts get messed up, fonts get shifted around randomly.

Agreed.  It's bullshit rent-seeking.  I expect this model to come along for Windows very soon.  Microsoft got sick of businesses hanging on to Windows XP for 10 years instead of getting on the upgrade treadmill as expected.

I'd rather deal with some of the lack of features and idiosyncrasies of open source software than be forced into a subscription based model for something that clearly doesn't require it.

Can't get that without a VLA any more.

We've tried. The only sources are too iffy to risk.

My phone and tablet took a LOT of fucking with to make work.

Both of our 8.1 PCs only took more than 5 minutes because of the bloat in HP's installer.

Microsoft is one of the shittiest companies that has ever existed founded by one of the shittiest people who has ever existed.

 

Not really.

The ONLY pain in the ass about re-installing is if you have multiple copies on one account. Finding the one installed on your PC, ESPECIALLY if you didn't copy down the installation key, is a PITA.

Look, I'm no fan of Office 2013 and I'd use 2010, given the option, but it's not nearly as bad as some here would have you believe. I've installed AT LEAST a couple hundred copies, with minimal problems, once I got the process down.

It's a hell of a lot better than 365.

The terms of the software were made loud and clear when you first bought it yet you first bought it. Apparently no one reads the EULAs then gets all bitchy about it later. You could have bought another product instead you chose this one. And we're supposed to feel sorry for you?

I run a work laptop with Windows 7 and I have, no shit, Word 97 on it.   True.



It also works perfect with those .'docx" and "xlsx" converters MS released for earlier versions of office when they came out with 2007.  

The dirty secret at Microsoft is that there haven't been too many major innovations in word processing, ok? The main things you'll miss in 97 are (1) the drop down font menu doesn't preview the fonts. (not that big a deal), and (2) the redline/track changes doesn't have the right margin markup and comment balloons like later versions. Footnotes work the same. Formatting looks the same. There are some things with pre-filled forms and other esoteric things that may be different, but very little differences in the core tech.

Also Word 97 is fast as shit on modern machines and a 5 or 6 megabyte memory footprint. (Outlook 2010 is like 75 megabytes).

Best of all?

Office 97 has (a) zero phone home product activation -- just put in the key from the CD; and (b) its license lets you install it on your main + one portable computer, and when you change computers you uninstall it from the old one and install it on the new one. Its the last version where Microsoft did not have pure and total control over the $300 box of software you bought from them. Office 2000? Office XP? Can't even install them anymore. MS Won't activate them. I think the same may apply to 2003. 2007 isn't bad, but a bit buggy. 2010 rocks, but getting harder to find and pricey.

I wrote thousands of pages of papers, legal briefs, articles, you name in on Office 97 from, well, 1997 through about 2011 when I got a computer that came with Office 2010 pre installed.     That's my main machine and there's nothing I write (even long legal briefs with footnotes and whatnot) that don't work just fine when I have to open them up on the laptop.

Most software is doing this now, MS is kinda late to the game in some way.
Not really there fault you bought into the model when they still sell the normal version.

Microsoft's cloud provides the user with the option of keeping a local copy on the local machine. If one relies entirely on the cloud as one's sole repository of their data...they fail at computers.



My home server has a local copy of all my data. The beauty of having the cloud as a backup is that I can access my stuff from any computer - anywhere - make changes to it....and it's simultaneously backed up on my home server.



The neat thing about computers is: you can achieve about any result you desire. You just have to set it up. It's a lot like life.

Is it safe to assume that this thread didn't go the way the OP planned

Not going to happen with me.  I'll stay w/ the last version I can buy, or I'll go completely to Linux before I do that.

And it fucking rocks. I have a CC subscription.

CC is the best thing ever. The only way to improve it would be to eliminate flash.

Litre office or Apache Open Office

Yet another thread where OP cries about his own completely foreseeable and wholly avoidable failure, gets called out on it the first 10 posts and never returns.

GD always comes through.

It's not near as daunting as it used to be.  I got a swift kick in the junk w/ Windows ME.. which caused me to really start making efforts to learn Linux (prior to that, I just kinda had it around, but didn't really try to make it my only OS).  I dual booted for about a year making every effort to only use Linux.  The less and less I used Windows, the more and more I realized I could do everything *I* needed to do, w/ Linux.

Now, it's second nature.... I buy a laptop, I come home, first thing I do is boot up a couple of my favorite Live USB's of a couple different distributions I like, and see how they run.

I don't do subscription software.  I bought Office, never intend on leasing it.