Getting Microsoft Word in XP home edition

Piste

I just got a new laptop which came with Windows XP Home, now I'm really missing MS Word for school assignments. Is there anyway I can get the office package on my edition of XP Home? I've heard that there's a student edition that's not too expensive, does anyone know if this is any good? And I've also heard that there's Open Office hich is free but isn't great.

Any advice about this would be very much appreciated

verbatim

First of all Open Office is a great free alternative. Its come a long way over the last few years, and has nearly all the features of Word. Try it out yourself, rather than relying on 3rd hand information. You wont be disappointed.

If your in college, your university might have a blanket academic licence which would allow you to install nearly any MS software on your laptop (or home PC). So it would cost your nothing.

SouperComputer

OpenOffice covers 95% of people's needs it costs nothing to try it. You can also use wordpad if you are stuck, run it from the command line.


Academic office costs about 160 bills last time I checked.

Capt'n Midnight

Just posting this as an example of openoffice goodness, every so often they fill in one of the few remaining missing items. VBA for word should be round the corner, not that many word uses use it.

Re quality - http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=06/11/08/1726205

As an Excel user, you may have looked at OpenOffice.org and found that it doesn't support Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), the Microsoft Office macro language. If you've spent years building hundreds of Excel macros, the fear of losing them all could keep you locked in to Office. If so, it's time to look again; Novell has taken OpenOffice.org's source code and create a version of its own that supports Excel VBA

oh yeah Microsoft Office 2007 / Vista will contain an option to generate PDF's, but openoffice has had this for yonks and aren't being sued by adobe
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/11/20/adobe_vista_complaints/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/06/05/microsoft_adobe_legal_spat/

ZygOte

open office is very good, as for student licenses for microsoft office, there is no difference between student licensed version than the commerical version , its just a special license only available to students as they are far less likley to have the cash for a full retail version, its also a gimmick by M$ to "hook" people on it when they are young if you will.

kaizersoze

Tesco sell the student edition of Office 2003 for €89.

Ruu_Old

Open Office will suit your needs, its compatible with Word docs and all that jazz.

kaimera

Office 2007 requires a beta plugin to save as PDF/XPS. It's not standard.

http://software4students.ie/

Office 2003 Pro for €96

Capt'n Midnight

kaimera wrote:

Office 2007 requires a beta plugin to save as PDF/XPS. It's not standard.

/my bad
I keep forgetting how often microsoft drop previously announced features as it gets closer to release date, maybe it will be in SR1


Another way to get Word is to get Works Suite

rough price
http://www.micromail.ie/MMprodDetail.aspx?productid=7789
Microsoft Works Suite 2006 CD
EUR 98(Price inc VAT EUR 118.58)
Micromail Number: 6451

Microsoft Money
Microsoft Word 2002
Microsoft Works 8
Microsoft Photo Premium 10
Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia Standard 2005
Microsoft AutoRoute 2005


or you could you could buy a newer version of word on it's own for twice the price :rolleyes:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0000BZ54V/interactiveda3151-21
Microsoft Office Word 2003
by Microsoft
Platform: Windows 2000 / XP
RRP: £199.99

corkandproud

Harvey's have dropped Student&Teacher Edition to €150

kaimera

Capt'n Midnight wrote:

/my bad
I keep forgetting how often microsoft drop previously announced features as it gets closer to release date, maybe it will be in SR1

Amm, wasn't it a suit by Adobe against MS that stopped the whole pdf thing in office12?

Oh, and Works sucks. €96 for Office2003 Pro. Bargin.

Capt'n Midnight

kaimera wrote:

Amm, wasn't it a suit by Adobe against MS that stopped the whole pdf thing in office12?

Oh, and Works sucks. €96 for Office2003 Pro. Bargin.

Well it is deliberately hobbled to get you to buy a full copy of office but it's still cheaper than a copy of Word for those who can't avail of student discounts.

And OpenOffice is still €96 cheaper than Office2003 Pro - Bargin
and foreign dictioneries are free for it too.

r3nu4l

Piste, I got hte student license Office package a few years ago.
1. Go to store
2. Buy package
3. Open package, wtf? No CD? Where is it?...
4. What's this?, a form?
5. Fill in form, bring to school/college, get signed by teacher/lecturer
6. Post form (to Holland IIRC)
7. Wait anxiously for postman to bring shiny new Office CD
8. Install Office
9. Oh Joy of joys, hurrah and happiness, Office is here

-or-

1. Download Open Office
2. Install Open Office
3. Oh Joy of joys, hurrah and happiness, OpenOffice is here

Either choice is fine imo. OpenOffice has a slight learning curve but not immense. When I bought the academic OFfice license I was very wary of handing my cash over for a cardboard box with no CD and a sheet of paper in it, thought it was a bit of a con Worked out fine.

TempestSabre

Piste wrote:

I just got a new laptop which came with Windows XP Home, now I'm really missing MS Word for school assignments. Is there anyway I can get the office package on my edition of XP Home? I've heard that there's a student edition that's not too expensive, does anyone know if this is any good? And I've also heard that there's Open Office hich is free but isn't great.

Any advice about this would be very much appreciated

What features of Word do you need anyway? I use MS Word a lot including a lot of VBA, but most people could use any Word Processor, like the one in Open Office.

Piste

I'm just used to Word so I'd have liked to stick to the familiar.

Thanks everyone for the advice, I installed OpenOffice and it seems to work quite well so far, though I noticed there's no spell check...is there a spell check feature that has to be turned on?

SouperComputer

Piste wrote:

I'm just used to Word so I'd have liked to stick to the familiar.

Thanks everyone for the advice, I installed OpenOffice and it seems to work quite well so far, though I noticed there's no spell check...is there a spell check feature that has to be turned on?

Theres definately a spell check. Press F7 just like in MS office.

ethernet

kaizersoze wrote:

Tesco sell the student edition of Office 2003 for €89.

I wonder will they stop stocking this in favour of their new Office suite?

Explosive_Cornflake

OpenOffice has been mentioned, but I'm using Kile these days. Good LaTeK fun.

TempestSabre

Explosive_Cornflake wrote:

OpenOffice has been mentioned, but I'm using Kile these days. Good LaTeK fun.

Whats Kile when its at home?

Capt'n Midnight

Explosive_Cornflake wrote:

OpenOffice has been mentioned, but I'm using Kile these days. Good LaTeK fun.

http://kile.sourceforge.net/

Kile does not run natively on a Windows machine, however I did have a report of a successful Kile install on a Windows machine using KDE on CygWin.

not exactly a drop in replacement for word
menu and file compatibility issues at a guess

OpenOffice has the same look and feel as Microsoft Office , though with different key words, and a more consistant interface / commands across the products - MSoffice at times feels like the different products still haven't been fully integrated together.

http://www.abisource.com/ - another GNU wp that a lot of people seem to like a lot

http://www.software602.com - This used to be free
again with the microsoft office document compatibility and look and feel, a lot cheaper than word , but infinitely dearer than the free alternatives .

Explosive_Cornflake

Hmm, You can get KDE to run through Cygwin X, I have a friend who'll be interested in that.

Capt'n Midnight

Explosive_Cornflake wrote:

Hmm, You can get KDE to run through Cygwin X, I have a friend who'll be interested in that.

I had a quick look at colinux but didn't spend a lot of time at it - http://www.colinux.org be - but it's only at 0.6 so a way to go yet.

anyway this is probably what might interest more
http://x.cygwin.com/ - Cygwin/X is a port of the X Window System to the Microsoft Windows family of operating systems. Cygwin/X runs on all recent consumer and business versions of Windows; as of 2003-12-27 those versions are specifically Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me, Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003.

TempestSabre

Somehow I don't see the many Word users switching to it.