Legitmate, Free Microsoft Office Download

Im not sure if this is unethical to ask, but I chose to present the question anyways.
I really need office for my computer and I am hesitant to shell out anymore money to Microsoft
Any help???

[favurl=http://www.openoffice.org/]http://www.openoffice.org/[/favurl]

When someone buys MS Office, they are licensed to install it on one desktop and one laptop, if I’m not mistaken. If you need it on your laptop, you might look for a friend who only uses it on their desktop and who is happy to let you use their license allocation on your laptop. It will be a legitimate copy and install, although if Microsoft would not be happy with the arrangement, they don’t pursue these one-off arrangements between friends.

^^^ What he said.

I have a problem with openoffice. When opening a document which was previously saved on another PC, the document is all messed up (and vice versa). Both PCs use openoffice. It’s only good for saving and opening documents on the original PC.
(This is just my experience, yours may be different.)

[quote=“Marty”]I have a problem with openoffice. When opening a document which was previously saved on another PC, the document is all messed up (and vice versa). Both PCs use openoffice. It’s only good for saving and opening documents on the original PC.
(This is just my experience, yours may be different.)[/quote]

Weird. I’ve never had this problem (not that I doubt you). Are you saving the documents in OO’s native format, or in something like .doc?

Strange indeed. The only messed up files I get are Word files that have been terribly formatted. (meaning: were written by people with no clue of text processing) Just recently I had an OO file that was written on Windows opened on OS X and the only problems were a few characters looking weird because they were not included in the fonts my OO used as substitution for the Windows fonts.

Other than this, there shouldn’t be a problem.

You can get a 30-day trial of Office 2007 directly from Microsoft:

office.microsoft.com/en-us/produ … 81033.aspx

And if you’re a student you can get Office 2007 fairly cheap with a valid .edu address. Google “ultimate steal”.

Note that they do stipulate that they may check that you have currently enrolled credits and if you can’t prove they will charge you the full price of the product.

IMO the only one this is a steal for is MS, since students are among the most likely to just pirate apps.

Go with Openoffice.

You used to be able to get student editions in Taiwan, and they never checked, you just went in the shop and bought it with no ID. er… apparently :blush: But you can’t find them anymore, not that I was looking or anything. :blush:

If I wanted Windows or Office or Photoshop and didn’t want to pay for them, I would get Ubuntu, Openoffice or Gimp instead. There’s usually some free legal alternative.

I bought the Office Home and Student Office 2007 for about 3000NT. It just says ‘for non-commercial use’ on the title bar.

[quote=“Marty”]I have a problem with openoffice. When opening a document which was previously saved on another PC, the document is all messed up (and vice versa). Both PCs use openoffice. It’s only good for saving and opening documents on the original PC.
(This is just my experience, yours may be different.)[/quote]

I don’t have a lot of experience with OpenOffice (I’m not big on office suites anyway). But from limited experience in the past with (ironically) Microsoft Office, I found some serious incompatibilities when a document was written in Chinese MS Word and then I tried to open it in English MS Word. Not sure if such a thing applies to OpenOffice though. If it does, again, it’s probably only in Word *.doc format that the problem would show.

Also, are both versions of OpenOffice the same? I know a recent big change occurred between version 2 and version 3. I don’t know if that would create the problem you’ve identified. Again, this was a big issue in MS Office (older versions couldn’t read the files of newer versions), and if OO has this problem, it’s most likely only if you’ve saved it in Word *.doc format.

regards,
DB