I’ve suggested the free LibreOffice suite to you several times, but a reader has a question.
“If I uninstall the Word and Office 365 Personal from my computer, will the program of Libre Office Suite be able to open and read all of my Word documents? Do I need something else to read the Word documents?”
LibreOffice should be able to open any Word, Excel, or PowerPoint file. Not only can you read them, you can still edit these files as well.
Here, I’ll open LibreOffice on my Mac. (LibreOffice is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux systems.)
I’ll select Open File.
Select a Word document.
Then click Open.
Here’s my Word document open in LibreOffice.
When it’s time to save the document, click the Save icon at the top. Here, I’m choosing Save As.
I can save the document as a Word, Open Office, or other types of document.
To learn more about LibreOffice, click here.
I love that you recommended LibreOffice to me some time ago! I’m able to use it to open a file on my external hard drive that uses a program I don’t have on this computer and really is no longer in existence (Pagemaker 7). LibreOffice allows me to export these files into a PDF file that I can copy and then open in Word, to either edit or save as a Word document. It has saved me SO much – both in having these files back on my computer, and in not having to completely re-do them. I love LibreOffice! Thank you, Cyn.
It’s been a number of years since I looked at Open Office. I’m not sure that LibreOffice existed then. I think that LibreOffice was designed by former Open Office employees. What I found then – which I hope has been corrected in the interim – was that the formatting of amounts was woefully inadequate compared with Microsoft Excel.
It could be that using a Custom formatting function would have solved the problem but my experience with Custom formatting of amounts is that it’s very time-consuming to achieve the desired result. Microsoft Excel provides every amount format used by accountants.
I’m a fan of Office myself. But for those who can’t or don’t want to spend the money, LibreOffice and Open Office certainly offer good alternatives.