+10 for Open Office

Bought a net book for my part time job... Office wouldn't install on it. Laded open office works perfectly and i thnk t's sicker too.

I still work in IT for a large telecoms comany..... Lol 2002 Honda VFR800
2002 Toyota Celica 140 Silver (mid life crisis - again!)
2007 FL2 GS Manual Army Reconnaissance Green + freel2.com sticker
2004 Toyota Celica 140 Black - Gone
2000 Toyota Celica 140 Silver - Gone
1998 Toyota Celica ST Pearl Green - Gone
1996 Nissan Primera 1.6 - Gone
1994 Rover Montego 1.6 Auto - Gone

but cant type for toffee  At work
At home

"I can't always believe facts I read on the web" - Charles Dickens

winner by default of the tractor vs caravan race

The fact remains, though, that if you want OpenOffice you might be better going for LibreOffice - at the moment that seems to be winning the battle of the OpenOffice forks.

Further to my last on this, Oracle effectively dropped OO, and OO is therefore now an Apache project. But it's effectively in competition with LibreOffice, and LO is taking over in many areas. A number of Linux distros (including Ubuntu - probably the most influential at the moment) now bundle LO rather than OO. There are many articles on the web about OO vs LP, this one (http://www.zdnet.com/does-openoffice-have-a-future-7000006480/) gives a reasonable summary of the situation, and includes the quote "True, under Apache OpenOffice is still improving, but most of those improvements seem to be coming from the LibreOffice code-base. So what exactly is the point of continuing OpenOffice? Darned if I know."!

At the moment if I had to choose one open source office package it would be LibreOffice.

What do I actually have installed? Well, on this machine I've currently got two different versions of MS Office (03 and 10, which do not play nicely together!), plus LibreOffice, plus OpenOffice!

Which do I actually use? I'm almost ashamed to admit it, but almost exclusively MS Office! It's just slicker, even if I do hate the 'new' UI in 2010.

If she is doing stuff for herself, the likes of OO and LO are perfectly capable of what you describe. When you start to get more complicated documents, then I've sometimes found that there are slight inconsistencies with how each display Word documents. They are good, but not perfect.

There is also the Web versions of MS Office for free that you can use. I've recently used WebOffice a considerable amount for editing numerous essays I've been doing of over the last year and making use of MS skydrive. ( its a very similar setup to Google Docs / Drive )