Is MS Office Home/Student Necessary?

[LisaR]

Looking at a MacBook Pro for DD (14). She currently has a PC and runs Open Office. She has never had any problems with it or felt limited with it. Does she need the student/home edition for $129 or will the Open Office serve her well through her high school / college years? Thanks!

 

[Feralpeg]

My daughter has a Mac. Most of her papers for college have to be turned in via email. Her professors would only accept papers in WORD. She had to buy Office for her Mac.

 

[LisaR]

Thanks! My daughter does take a lot of online classes right now and she has always been able to submit her papers using the Open Office version of Word. She is starting a dual enrollment class at the community college so we will have to see if what she has is good enough.

 

[LMC]

My DS14 is going into 9th grade but he has had to do powerpoint presentations for school since 7th grade. He had to do them at school so I got Home office/student last yr when I ordered DD's laptop so he can do all of it from home now. Other than that, I would think any wordprocessor would work since she will have to turn in paper copies of her work in HS.

 

[Imzadi]

Check out Google Docs. It is a Free web-based word processor and spreadsheet online. Nothing to download. I don't have MS Office, Word or Excel. When I get in a document in either one of those, I'm able to open it, edit & save it in the original format and email it back out with Google Docs and a Gmail address. They are able open it in the original format.

Also Papa Deuce posted this thread a couple weeks ago. Maybe you can wait till then.
Microsoft Office will be FREE starting in 2010.

 

[golfgal]

Our kids often need to email papers OR they start them at home and finish them at school or vice versa. They could only do this with Word, which is what the school uses. Check with your high school though, they often have negotiated rates for students. We can get the student version of Office for about $60-70 or so through the school.

 

[Nie0214]

I used OpenOffice.org for my undergrad. There is an option to save your documents as a word file.

 

[PatsMom]

My DD is planning to use Open Office for her first year of college to save on expenses. She's talked to others at the university and they haven't had problems using Open Office.

If it becomes an issue we'll buy her the student edition. Or I'll remove my Office Professional from my computer and legally install on hers - I almost never use Excel and Powerpoint and could easily do anything I wanted on my office computer. And any word processor would work for what I do on my home computer.

 

[RangerPooh]

I would invest in it once she gets to college. It was a requirement that papers submitted online be completed in WORD. As another poster mentioned, Powerpoint Presentations are also fairly common in the academic setting. If she doesn't need it now, then I wouldn't worry too much about it. Something to look into is if the university supplies it for free or low cost as part of your academic fees.

 

[Galahad]

I used OpenOffice.org for my undergrad. There is an option to save your documents as a word file.

Don't use open office for a variety of reasons but it is my understanding that you can save just about any open office file other than a database in a format that is compatible with MS Office applications.

 

[Nie0214]

Don't use open office for a variety of reasons but it is my understanding that you can save just about any open office file other than a database in a format that is compatible with MS Office applications.

Yes, you can. I would save it as the document type needed and occasionally check my files at the computer lab (saved my files on a flash drive) and never had issues opening them with Microsoft.

 

[Inigo]

DD uses Open Office exclusively, and loves it. I use it and Word interchangeably, and they are so similar there doesn't seem to be much advantage to using MS Office. With Open Office, files can be saved in the MS Office format, so your child should be able to submit everything using OO.

We'll go ahead and get the latest version of MS Office this week when DD goes to her college for a couple workshops. (She officially starts college on August 21st!!!!) Her university has an agreement with Microsoft and several other software companies where she can get software for just the cost of the CDs. Everyone should check with their colleges to see if their schools have a similar deal. She'll get some expensive software for almost free.

 

[PA2DISNEY]

I would recommend getting the Microsoft Office Student edition. I recently graduated from college and have kids still in middle/high school and we all use it. It would cut out a lot of distractions if she didn't have to reformat all of her work. And besides, I think the student editions come with Excel and Powerpoint which I'm sure she will need in high school. Most teachers will specify Microsoft Office products for their assignments.

Check with your employer and/or school to see if you can buy the products at a discounted rate. My employer offers it for just $20. It's worth looking into it.

 

[themarquis]

Open Office should be fine. Everything can be formatted and saved as word/powerpoint/excel. The result is a document that is virtually identical to a word document (in fact, no one will even know she's using it since you can't tell by looking at the files!)

Tons of folks in academia (including students, profs, staff, etc.) use OO exclusively now. Yay for free software!!!

 

[Towncrier]

I find it ironic that the following article predicting the death of Microsoft Word (as a part of the Office suite) was published today:

http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/08/microsoft-word-1983---2009-rest-in-peace.ars

I think that your DD will do fine with Open Office.