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Posted by:

David Solomons
27 Aug 2013

Out of curiosity, do any of those free alternatives have the option to use the Control key for accented letters? For example, in microsoft word you can get an e-circumflex by pressing control-shift 6 then the e, a u-umlaut by pressing control-shift semicolon then the u, a c cedilla by pressing control-comma then the c. I Know Open Office doesn't do this. Do any of the others do it?

Posted by:

Dianne
27 Aug 2013

Is OpenOffice no longer available. You mention it in passing but it is not part of your list. I've been using it for quite awhile and have been quite happy with it. Unless you don't care about privacy or data mining, I'd be very careful about using Google or any other cloud based applications. It's nice that they make money off your information but it may not be what you want.

Posted by:

Don Smith
27 Aug 2013

I've had Jarte forever and it's great for the average person.

Posted by:

Jon Stubbs
27 Aug 2013

Once again, excellent work Bob!

What causes me to pause before shifting is that I find that as i get older it is harder and harder to shift from one set of commands to another. I've been trying Apple's page as some of my computers are Apples. It is too different. I fear that i will have a similar experience with other word processing programs.

A double whammy for me is that I use Word's review function for my editing work. My customers usually depend on Word so I fear that other programs won't be compatible (e.g., able to carry over editing markups).

Have you heard of any low cost word processing software that is compatible with Word's review function?

Thanks,
Jon

Posted by:

Gilson Chapple
27 Aug 2013

AN OPINION FROM UK
When I use my Mac I am very impressed by NeoOffice I have not yet found anything wrong with it.
When I want to write anything on my PC that's important, I always use Serifs PagePlus as my word processor (it's not rigid - it's more free form; which suits my way of working. I'm not bad at grammar and spelling; so I rarely need spell check, and if I want to add pictures or Photo's its all there - RECOMMENDED

p.s. There are hundreds of word processors and most are bloated or are too quirky to be useful for most people.

Posted by:

Stan Duncan
27 Aug 2013

In your comments about Kingsoft office, you said that the interface was similar to the old Microsoft Office of 2003. However, the new (and still free) version has a ribbon look-alike which is very similar to the newer versions of MS Office.

I also like the tremendous versatility of the version for Androids. I can do almost anything to a Word document on my phone now and save it to dropbox and call it up later at home. Or email it (I use Zoho) or even print it--all from my phone. The breadth of its capabilities is unbelievable.

Posted by:

Keith
27 Aug 2013

As a confirmed Word Perfect user, I checked E-Bay where many listing for "full" office program X6 is available for $52-56 with free shipping. Google docs and Open Office don't work nearly so well for me.

Posted by:

Carole
27 Aug 2013

I still use WordPerfect from time to time, but not very often.

Posted by:

Steve Shearer
27 Aug 2013

So which one do you think is the best mimic? I use OpenOffice, but cannot convert well to MSO.

Posted by:

Eric
27 Aug 2013

What... no OpenOffice? It does the 'not responding' thing here and there, but it's still my #1 (Kingsoft is a reasonably close second).

Posted by:

Buffet
28 Aug 2013

I prefer OpenOffice.

Posted by:

MrToo
28 Aug 2013

I like Libre and Open Office. However, they are not as compatible with MS Office as some are to believe. Complex spread sheets and Word documents with lots of formatting seem to blow up. And I hate to say, PowerPoint is the superior presentation program. I do use Libre as my primary office suite.

Posted by:

Sandy Papavasiliou
28 Aug 2013

My Microsoft Office was an older version and it got the SHUDDERS. Just dieing a sad death. I downloaded Kingsoft Suite (free) and it is great. Compatible with other similar programs. It asked to be the default and I said YES. No complaints at all.

Posted by:

Old Man
28 Aug 2013

I noticed you mentioned OpenOffice, but you didn't comment on it. Why is that?

I've been using OpenOffice for years - along with Microsoft Office - for many years. So far I've been quite happy with it. Do you know of any problems it has that I may have missed?

Posted by:

Richard
28 Aug 2013

David,

You can get all those accented letters in any application using the 'United States - International' keyboard layout. There are five 'dead keys' (`~^'") which have no visible effect until you press another key. yields the symbols shown above but a suitable letter key yields an 'accented' letter: ñàÊóÿç. I think they cover most western European languages.

Posted by:

David
28 Aug 2013

Hi Richard
Thanks for the tip. I found the acute, grave and umlaut. Not yet found the tilde and circumflex on the USA keyboard (clearly not in the same position as on the UK keyboard), but useful anyway :-)

Posted by:

Richard
28 Aug 2013

That should be: [space] yeilds the symbols shown...

Posted by:

Misterfish
30 Aug 2013

My favourite is Office '97. Nice, simple, logical program, with accented letters. I've been forced to use 2010 and hate its overwhelming complexity - and as it can be bought on eBay for a few quid, it is virtually free.

And you would think that with all those functions in MS Office 2010 that MS would by now have offered their Excel users a word count function

Open Office is OK, and I like to work in its simpler interface, but there are severe format problems when converting files into my clients' preferred MS Word format.

Posted by:

Bruce Fraser
31 Aug 2013

SoftMaker Office has a free version: www.freeoffice.com

Posted by:

José
02 Sep 2013

Bob, I'd like to add that SoftMaker not only offers a pay-for office suite (which, btw., is IMHO by far the best alternative to Microsoft Office because of its great interoperability, speed, reliability, and it's broad scope of features - and for its very fair price).

SoftMaker also gives a free, full-fledged office suite called FreeOffice, which has the same brilliant import and export filters as the commercial version,but a few less features.

You get it here for Windows and Linux:

freeoffice.com

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