MS Office or MS Works

[newt130n]

Hi,
Has anyone used both of these office suites and if so, how do they compare, please?
Thank you for reading. My MS Office Pro 2000 is faulty after many years of good service and I need to upgrade to 2003 or 2007 but the price is prohibitive, so considering Works instead.

[deltadelta48]

Hi,
Has anyone used both of these office suites and if so, how do they compare, please?
Thank you for reading. My MS Office Pro 2000 is faulty after many years of good service and I need to upgrade to 2003 or 2007 but the price is prohibitive, so considering Works instead.

I had Works on my last computer and it was ok for occasional use but often I was unable to open Word documents or other people could not open my stuff. Kind of a hassle to take a disk into printer and have them unable to extract your stuff. When it was unable to open something, it tried to sell me Word 2007 so I could open it! Spreadsheet was sub par, and few other things were included that I never used. Word processing had fewer functions, definitely you were missing some of the things we got used to on Word, no symbols, less choices in fonts etc. Definitely an economy version of Word.

On this new computer I bought MS Office Home Word 2007 I think it is called. Ran around $165 or so and is very good. Includes spreadsheet, etc. I was a little surprised of the changes MSN made to Word. Seem silly to me. The look is completely different. There is a "ribbon" on top instead of a toolbar, with lots of silly dropdowns. Names of the functions are totally out of left field, so there is a learning curve to find how to turn on bold or cut and paste. All come off of drop downs, which to me is a time waster but you can adjust and put some buttons on top, etc. Microsoft, must think we need this sort of stuff. But documents are compatible and the system is nice.

[kengillam]

You could consider Open Office that's free and compatible with Mickysoft it's an open source software. I'm still running Office 97 but would probably get this in preference to spending megabucks if my old version stopped working. Have
you tried removing it and re-installing?

http://why.openoffice.org/

[TreasuredBargains]

I agree with Ken - use OpenOffice.

I had Microsoft Office 98 for many years and liked it so when it came time to upgrade, I downloaded the free trial version of 2007. It was incredibly slow to use, and crashed several times a week.
I don't know anyone who likes Works, so I searched for an alternative and found OpenOffice. It's free to download so I tried that out and really like it. It's faster than Micro, very similar command functions (I use mainly the documents and spreadsheets) and hardly ever crashes. And, best of all, it's completely FREE!

Oh, and you can save all your documents/spreadsheets in Word/Excel format.

[MHTTrading]

Still Using Microsoft Office 97 Pro, yes I'm a dinasaur but hey it works for me.

[deltadelta48]

I agree with Ken - use OpenOffice.

I had Microsoft Office 98 for many years and liked it so when it came time to upgrade, I downloaded the free trial version of 2007. It was incredibly slow to use, and crashed several times a week.
I don't know anyone who likes Works, so I searched for an alternative and found OpenOffice. It's free to download so I tried that out and really like it. It's faster than Micro, very similar command functions (I use mainly the documents and spreadsheets) and hardly ever crashes. And, best of all, it's completely FREE!

Oh, and you can save all your documents/spreadsheets in Word/Excel format.

Good alternative. Free is good as long as the documents are compatible with most other systems. I got tired of Works documents not opening most of the time. While MSN 2007 is the industry standard, they made it way too complicated for what it does. Does exactly what 1998 does but by putting features under stupid titles like "references" and "developer".

Go for free!

[TexasAda]

1)Must you be online while using Open Office?

2)Are your documents stored on a remote server rather than your own computer?

3)Can you run both Open Office and Microsoft Office at the same time?

[astral276]

While MSN 2007 is the industry standard

MS create many 'industry standards'. The only problem is that they then ignore them.

I use MS Office XP because I am used to Outlook and FrontPage - which are the applications I use it for most. There may be better out there but it would involve an unnecessary learning curve and maybe expense.

[Anniemcc2]

1)Must you be online while using Open Office?

2)Are your documents stored on a remote server rather than your own computer?

3)Can you run both Open Office and Microsoft Office at the same time?

You download OpenOffice from http://www.openoffice.org/product/product.html install, and use off line. Everything is stored on your PC aka M/soft Office.

Don't know about no.3, but would imagine it could crash your PC

Was reading yesterday that many offices are dumping Office and using OpenOffice as it's more stable and not prone to expensive updates/glitches, etc.

HTH

[Gothicina]

1)Must you be online while using Open Office?

2)Are your documents stored on a remote server rather than your own computer?

3)Can you run both Open Office and Microsoft Office at the same time?

I've used both at the same time with no problem, but I've never tried editing a document in them both at once, I'm guessing that would cause a problem.

Open office has its own native document formats, as well as the MS ones, plus it can save as PDF, I know the older versions of MS Office couldn't do that