[Solved] Comparison to Microsoft Office

[Mdwlego]

I have just graduated from college, and thus my Microsoft Office student subscription has ended.
And I don't want to pay the ridiculous annual fees to be able to use Microsoft office ($69.99/year).
How does OpenOffice compare to Microsoft Office?

[RusselB]

Welcome to the Forums
While OpenOffice is highly compatible with MSOffice, LibreOffice is, imo, has a higher level of compatibility, though since neither OpenOffice or LibreOffice is MSOffice there are, and always will be, some incompatibilities.
I suggest you give OpenOffice and/or LibreOffice a try, they are both free, and check your MSOffice files in those respective programs, then you'll be able to see just what does or doesn't work, and you can post new topics regarding specific questions about things that aren't working or aren't working as you are expecting coming from MSOffice.

[John_Ha]

See [Tutorial] Differences between Microsoft and AOO/LO files for a description of differences and for why you should always work in, and save Writer files as .odt, Calc files as .ods, Impress files as .odp, etc.

[Zizi64]

https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Fea ... oft_Office

[FJCC]

If you want to use OpenOffice for your personal use or to collaborate with others that use it (or LibreOffice), it should serve you well. You can write long, complex documents, make typical spreadsheets like personal budgets or investment tracking, and write presentations suitable for your local charity or personal business. If you need to collaborate professionally with people using MS Office, you need MS Office. They will probably share documents via Teams or some similar tool that assumes MS Office. Exporting in MS format from LibreOffice will always run the risk of formatting problems and OpenOffice does not export in the modern MS Office formats. Using anything but MS Office will be a constant hassle under such conditions.

[LastUnicorn]

You can try out LibreOffice and OpenOffice without actually installing them to your system by downloading and using the portable versions of them:

OpenOffice Portable
LibreOffice Portable (Fresh)
LibreOffice Portable (Still)

Note that all of those portable versions are 32-bit. OpenOffice is only available in 32-bit anyway. LibreOffice is available in 64-bit but you would need to download them from the LibreOffice download page and fully install one of them to your system.

LibreOffice Fresh is the current most up-to-date version of LibreOffice. LibreOffice Still is a version slightly older than Fresh and should have most of its major bugs ironed out.