Free office suites — LibreOffice and Google Drive save students money

The price of Microsoft Office Home & Student 2010 on Amazon is a jaw dropping $101.49. This includes the 2010 versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote.

For many students, this is a ridiculous amount of money, but due to the allegedly not evil practices of Google and the kindness of programmers, there are free programs students can use that offer a viable alternative to Microsoft Office such as LibreOffice and Google Drive.

LibreOffice

LibreOffice is an open source office suite that does word processing, spreadsheets, slideshows, diagrams, database maintenance and composes mathematical formulas.

LibreOffice is supported by Microsoft Windows, Mac OS, and Linux.

I use LibreOffice primarily for word processing and it works very similar to Microsoft Word.

LibreOffice calls its word processing program Writer. For those who are familiar to Microsoft Word, the layout is basically the same with similar features such as an intuitive tool bar, spell check and every bell and whistle that Microsoft Word has.

Additionally, Writer allows documents to be saved in a variety of formats including PDF, DOCX, DOC, RTF, XHTML, and ODF (Open Document Format- the automatic setting for documents to be saved as), which is handy when you are sending things between computers that have different versions of Microsoft software on them.

Writer can be used for peer-editing documents and those on the receiving end are able to see edits to Word documents made in Writer and open all documents successfully.

Writer has the exact same spell check system as Microsoft Word, being that Writer uses a red line to point out mistakes, but Writer’s spell check system is not nearly as accurate. Writer will suggest words that are not two words need to become two words and miss some spelling mistakes entirely. Also, the format painter in Writer only tends to work when it wants to.

Google Drive

Google Drive is the free office suite system from Google. In Google Drive, you can create documents, presentations (like PowerPoint in Word) and Forms which can be used to send out multiple choice questions for things such as invitations and surveys. Google Drive can be downloaded to use on a computer and saves documents in a cloud so that they can be accessed from any device.

Google Drive is supported by Microsoft Windows, Mac OS, and Linux.

In Google Docs, you can easily share documents between various groups of people. With a couple clicks, users can send documents between different people and if the other person has a Gmail account, the creator of the document can allow other people to edit it directly online.

Google Drive also has another bonus that wherever you have Internet access you also have all of your documents, presentations, etc. That way there are no worries about forgetting the flash drive for a presentation or a technical glitch causing one copy of a presentation to fail.

While Google Drive does allow users to upload and download various formats such as DOC, DOCX, PDF, PPT, etc. the transition does not always go smoothly. For example, one time a  resume that I uploaded to Google Drive as a DOC and downloaded as a DOC on a different computer came back with some of the lines randomly shifted to the right.

Additionally, Google Docs does have a better spell check than Writer, but Google Docs relies on the internet browser for grammar checking. Since most browsers have spell checking and not grammar checking, this often means that grammar errors will go unnoticed. Furthermore, Google Drive can only be used if you have a Gmail account.

Aleya Ericson can be reached at [email protected]

 

1 reply

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