[RESOLVED] Seek Free Office Suite Recommendations

[terryZ]

A relative recently bought a Gateway laptop running XP HOME. It came with Works installed. She's asked me about buying MS Word (or Office) to replace it.

I told her I remember seeing a number of free office suite out there that may be just as good.

Before I recommend any of them, does anyone have any actual experience with OpenOffice or other free office software?

Thanks in advance,

[John Steven]

Open Office is an excellent alternative to M$ office. Used it with several different distros of Linux (and Windows) without incident.

[jmtjet]

Here's a link to OpenOffice;

http://www.openoffice.org/

I've used it with Linux for sometime. Does everything MS Word does and more. It doesn't cost anything to give it a try. If you don't like it, you can always un-install it.

[SuperSparks]

I haven't found anything that I like nearly as much as MS Office (especially the 2003 version), but Open Office is the only free one that comes even remotely close.

[terryZ]

Thanks all.

From these and other sites' posts, it seems that Open Office is the way to go.

[gary.newelluk]

I have used Open Office and I agree it is really good.

You may consider splitting up the idea of office software though. For example get a wordprocessor, spreadsheet etc separately.

PS: I quite like Lotus Smartsuite.