achesley Loc: SW Louisiana

Been using Softmaker Office for the last 5 or so years. Very satisfied.

charlienow Loc: Hershey, PA

I use office 10. Works for me.

Chuck

mrtkarlin Loc: Ashland, Oregon

I’ve been using libreoffice text and spreadsheet docs for several years after using Microsoft office for 20 years. Works flawlessly when you figure out where the formatting menu items live. Great product and free.

BobHartung Loc: Bettendorf, IA

Microsoft does sell a two versions for home use. "Microsoft 365 Personal" as a subscription and "Office Home & Student 2019(the latest iteration) as a one-time purchase. They also sell a "Microsoft 365 Family" as an annual subscription.

I have neooffice installed and it is okay except it is poorly documented and not good IMHO for making labels. it does work similar to Word but is just not as malleable. However, it is in some ways easier to use than Word with Word's radically altered meaning system.

Comparison page at Microsoft.com.

PhotogHobbyist Loc: Bradford, PA

From the beginning, I hve declined MS Office because of the cost and the cloud. I've used Apache OpenOffice for several years and fund it very appropriate for my needs. I've had no problems.

neillaubenthal

Apple's Pages, Numbers, and Keynote are quite nice and will open and save Office format documents. The only drawback is that they're less fully featured than the Microsoft apps…but if you don't use things like pivot tables in Excel or change tracking in Word then one can get along quite well with them. Best of all…they're free if you own Apple hardware.

Obviously upgrading to Office 365 subscription is also an option as are LibraOffice, NeoOffice, and a couple others that I can't remember offhand…but the last time I seriously looked at the alternatives they all had some issues with conversion back and forth with native MS format documents. No more or less than Apple's apps but different groups of issues.

Switching to Pages for wordsmithing was pretty easy…Numbers is a bit different and a lot of your muscle memory from Excel doesn't work anymore…as Numbers just looks, works, and feels different from Excel. However…once you figure out where the stuff you need is it again is a pretty easy conversion.

edrobinsonjr Loc: Boise, Idaho

I use Libre Office. It works well, I haven't had any compatibility issues and its totally free.

Ed

printer273

Apples suite of software, Pages and Numbers can read and you can edit Microsoft word and xcel files. Use them quite often and they work fine. They come free with Apple computers

knightsga Loc: Jackson, GA

Check "pcsalesonline.com" for MS Office 2019 Professional Plus (Access, Excel, Outlook,
PowerPoint, Publisher, Word) for $49.20. Will receive OEM product key, lifetime license.
I upgraded from the 2013 version and it works flawlessly.

Jeffers

Microsoft Office 365 (now called Microsoft 365) isn't really expensive if you use its capabilities. It offers up to six users a Terabyte of OneDrive and if you use OneNote on top of OneDrive it's awesome. Until this year, you could only share your accounts with members of your household. Now you may share your accounts with relatives. OneNote has a much more powerful search capability than File Search. In OneNote you can create Tabs and multiple pages for each Tab. You can create shared folders with family members. You can create links to anything in your OneDrive on each page. You can type anything into the OneNote Search Bar and it will search all of the OneDrives in your account. At $99/year it's well worth it.

Delderby Loc: Derby UK

Yes - IF those capabilities are required. I doubt many do need them.
Same with PS/LR - IF you use all the capabilities, it might be worth subscribing, but otherwise?

hj Loc: Florida

We continue to get good advice! Thanks everyone for the information. As a result of suggestions here in the forum I have since tried both PAGES and LIBRE OFFICE. Both work and i think in will concentrate on using Libre office.

SpikeW Loc: Butler PA

If you decide to move up to Big Sur be even more careful but what you will get is a very impressive desktop image. I am still trying to get somethings back and I just got my luminar 4 back and in only two weeks and they say everything will be faster.