Alternatives to MS Word / Outlook

Mr.Tuttlinghorn

Hi,
I'm about to buy a laptop (probably Dell, Inspiron) for my wife, working from home) . She needs a word processor and email, and is familiar with word & outlook. I'm just finding it hard to believe that i need to shell out something like 150 notes for office - just to get word and outlook.

Are there alternative ways of either getting the same software but cheaper, or alternative software that will interoperate with word . It will be quite important for it to be r e a l l y e a s y for other people to receive docs and open them using ms word.

Anyone used officestar ??
thanks
PS, the intel ads are starting to get to me - is a dual core proc worth the extra few quid ? This laptop will need to handle some photos and video, but no major film production work. The Dell x300, 1.6ghz, that I'm using now seems to do fine and its 2 yrs old. Theres a 1.6 ghz with 1mb RAM for 660 EUR

DonkeyStyle \o/

http://www.openoffice.org ?
http://www.mozilla.org ?

Ruu_Old

Openoffice will do the trick for office applications (its free) and Mozilla Thunderbird for your email.

edit: schnap, too schlow this time.

feylya

Open Office and Thunderbird are what you need. Open Office saves in MS Word format so it's compatible.

Dual cores are nice but if it's only for word processing and video watching, they're not necessary.

mr_disc

But there is no alternative to Microsoft :rolleyes:

TempestSabre

feylya wrote:

Open Office and Thunderbird are what you need. Open Office saves in MS Word format so it's compatible.

Dual cores are nice but if it's only for word processing and video watching, they're not necessary.

The dual cores have better battery life....;)

Capt'n Midnight

mr_disc wrote:

But there is no alternative to Microsoft :rolleyes:

The irony is strong with this one

OpenOffice is more compatible with word then some versions of word are to each other. It can open corrupt files that word can't open. Also extra language dictioneries are free. And for years it's been able to save files as PDF, the next version of microsoft word will be able to do that too.

Thunderbirds are go
In fairness it does not replace all of the non-email functionality of Outlook.

Check out the retail price of Office Pro if you think €150 is a lot.

Orion

Capt'n Midnight wrote:

In fairness it does not replace all of the non-email functionality of Outlook.

But the Mozilla suite does tbh. The Sunbird plugin gives you the calendar functionality - albeit not as well as Outlook's. I've long considered Outlook to be the best app that MS ever delivered but it's not worth the price when there's alternatives out there.

So now I use Thunderbird for mail. Openoffice for productivity and Rainlendar for my calendar.

Mr.Tuttlinghorn

thanks folks. downloading openoffice for a gander. is this the same as officestar or is there any such thing ??

Mr.Tuttlinghorn

ok, i get it officestar = sells furniture, staroffice = $70
(yes i remembered the existence of google ..)