Free MS Word alternatives?

[morkus64]

I am sick and tired of Word.

I need something else which can actually handle images and captions properly, and will do automatically renumber footnotes, etc.

TIA.

 

[MrChad]

Open Office?

 

[gsaldivar]

It's hard to tell from the brief description you gave of your requirements for the software, but it sounds like you might be trying to use Word as a DTP (desktop publishing) app? If that is the case, consider trying MS Publisher or one of the free alternatives like Scribus:

http://www.scribus.net/

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f4/Scribus-1.3-Linux.png

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scribus

Good luck!

 

[corkyg]

Echo Open Office!

http://www.openoffice.org/

 

[sivart]

Echo Open Office!

http://www.openoffice.org/

This would be a 3rd vote.

 

[lxskllr]

This would be a 3rd vote.

#4

 

[Red Squirrel]

Open Office. While it's not *AS* feature rich as MS office, I think it's good enough for 99% of users. Only thing I don't like about OO is the very limited selection of colors, like for borders, fonts etc in Impress (did not check if it's the same case for Writer). I still use Office 2003 I find it's pretty good, the versions above that are way too bloated though.

What sucks is I am seeing more and more of pptx and xlsx and those weird formats. Nothing (even the ms viewers) seem to open those properly.

 

[MrChad]

Open Office. While it's not *AS* feature rich as MS office, I think it's good enough for 99% of users. Only thing I don't like about OO is the very limited selection of colors, like for borders, fonts etc in Impress (did not check if it's the same case for Writer). I still use Office 2003 I find it's pretty good, the versions above that are way too bloated though.

What sucks is I am seeing more and more of pptx and xlsx and those weird formats. Nothing (even the ms viewers) seem to open those properly.

docx, xlsx and pptx are the new file formats for Office 2007. You can view them in Office 2003 by installing the Office Compatibility Pack.

 

[Zepper]

You might want to try the Lotus Symphony version of OO. It is also a free download. Check it out here:
http://symphony.lotus.com/software/lotus/symphony/home.nsf/home
- It may have some things you don't get with standard OOO. Available for Win, Mac and several distros of Linux. OTOH, a true page layout (desktop publishing) program may be more appropriate to the tasks you have in mind. I saw Scribus mentioned above, I think there are others.

.bh.

 

[Dark Penguin]

Abiword still around?

 

[Chiefcrowe]

open office! my dad uses it now and he never complains!

 

[Rottie]

OpenOffice took my vote #6

 

[Lorthreth]

http://go-oo.org/
Novell's version of Open Office.

 

[spikespiegal]

No one mentioned WordPad 🙂

 

[ultimatebob]

Do you guys think that OpenOffice actually handles images and captions better than Microsoft Office does? It doesn't seem to in my experience.

 

[Fox5]

OpenOffice.
Abiword.
Softmaker Office.

Or how about the Microsoft Office 2010 free beta, which will eventually have a free online version? (similar to google docs)

 

[MrChad]

Do you guys think that OpenOffice actually handles images and captions better than Microsoft Office does? It doesn't seem to in my experience.

I've never had an issue with Word's handling, so I can't really say.

 

[TJCS]

bump Open Office!

 

[PsiStar]

No one mentioned WordPad 🙂

When did they stop including edlin?🙁

I like OpenOffice also, but am still using Power Point because of a convenient VB script to build slides from another program.