Are my past microsoft word documents read by libre office or do I need to get another program to access past documents.
You say ‘microsoft word documents’. However, this may mean a couple of very different file formats. Which is yours?
LibreOffice will usually read MS Word documents just fine. Occasionally, there may be some formatting issues when reading MS Office documents in LibreOffice or when exporting LibreOffice documents to MS Office file types.
I’ve pretty much completely abandoned Office 2010 on my Win 7 machines (I just haven’t uninstalled it yet) and I’m using LibreOffice exclusively now. I’m still learning how to better use it but, then again, I was still learning how to use Office 2010 after using it for six or seven years.
LibreOffice is free so it wouldn’t cost you anything to download and install it to see if it will meet your needs. There is a little bit of a learning curve so give it chance. Feel free to ask questions here.
Like Lady Fitzgerald, my partner and me are using LibreOffice and before that OpenOffice for all our text and spread sheet work. My work isn’t text editing heavy, so no problems here. My partner is translator and translates/edits NL->EN, EN->NL, DK->NL and DK->EN. Here we thought we would meet some ‘learning moments’ … and they came … LibreOffice offers more tools and the LO-community offers more extensions to make work easy and more fun.
But hey, I’m biased. Never been a big fan of MS.