In RE the badvice that anyone simply give up and buy MS Office: I owned legit MS software and every MS “operating system” since 2.1 (so I’m ancient, get over it), and I always had the top level, fully-optioned MS Office suite; I used mainly Excel and Word, and a host of non-MS software in my businesses.
I didn’t have 2.1 or 3.0 long enough to experience a crash with either, and my first crash with 3.1 happened after more than 10,000 hours of uptime. Each time Office glitched, I upgraded.
The only useful OS support and the only useful Anti-Malware support I ever got came freely from helpful users not affiliated with MS; the only “solution” offered by MS was for me to purchase new software or pay for premium support.
I tolerated the abuse because I felt trapped, as though timely learning to use a different OS or office suite was beyond my ability. I had some business setbacks and then my mother fell ill; I used Excel to chart and to calculate Mom’s meds, intake and output, condition and so forth, to ensure she got the best possible care.
Then MS Office crashed and I couldn’t find all my discs, and even though my suite was registered with MS, their “customer support” refused to verify me as the legitimate owner and said if I wanted to access my files, I needed to shell-out nearly $800 to download a suite I already owned!
Thanks to Yahoo! Answers, I was introduced to the free-download OpenOffice.Org suite: Calc not only recovered and opened my Excel file, but also allowed me to save the file in both the MS “.xls” format and the much more efficient “.ods” format.
I used OpenOffice.Org at home for nearly a year before I put it on my business machines – but I, perhaps stupidly, continued in my reliance on Windows, until XP and 7 took out 2 HDDs in the same week. Altogether over the years, MS Windows cost me about 3 terabytes of data and 23 drives – and I finally had all the abuse from MS that I was willing to take.
I switched to Linux Mint; I started with the “Cinnamon” version of “Rebecca” – which included LibreOffice – and I’ve since been using both LM and LO with great success. The Linux community is generally both polite and helpful.
If I had it all to do over, and I knew then what I now know, I would have switched to Linux as soon as possible, and I would have switched to OpenOffice.org as soon as possible. LibreOffice is slightly more like MS Office in some ways, but it is nearly identical in features and functionality to OOo.
I sympathize with those who quietly accept the MS rubbish they are offered: the juggernaut’s ubiquitous lies of user-friendliness are the moral equivalent of the promises of happiness told by schoolyard pushers of narcotics – but without the legal prohibitions or stigma.
The open-source community has done a wonderful job of making the sober transition as painless as it reasonably can be, and it continues to make strides towards improved interoperability, security, functionality and ease of use; meanwhile, agents loyal to MS profiteers do all they are able to frustrate especially the freeware community and it’s goals.
When you land on freedom’s shores, burn your ships and never give thought to going back. Until you’re ready for that sort of commitment, you’re going to squander your labors feeding the cancer that is eating you. I just hope that when you realize your error that you will have time and other resources to redeem.
