Well, they say "Preview" and have a warning that some functionality will eventually require an Office 360 subscription.

I got used to it... somehow. I avoid using MSO as much as I can.

What I really hate is the "modern UI" flat design. Flat should be reserved for content. Just make a test: Open 6-8 windows different sized windows in both Windows 7 and Windows 8+ and scatter them across the desktop. In W7 it's very clear which is which and what is foreground and what is in the back. Win8 -> huge mess of lines. If some of these windows have a flat UI like Office 2013, i.e. Outlook or Excel your desktop turns into dadaist art, but nothing you would want to work with.

I used LibreOffice and I can't say I found anything I coudn't do (though I'm not a heavy user). However I just hate how it looks. I'm currently using Kingsoft Office (the free version) which is now called WPS Office. For basic stuff is just as good as MS Office, and the programs are really light (both in size and RAM usage), seriously the installer is like 60mb. It is only in english though while MS Office and LibreOffice have hundreds of language options.

Amen to that. Even the Amiga OS made the windowing obvious, and without needing fancy gadgetry. The Metro interface is a deliberate style decision, one not motivated by technology but by artistic pretension. It is a failed attempt at true minimalism, undertaken by people with, if you'll excuse the pun, only a surface understanding of the aesthetic.

Microsoft has always wanted to be Apple, and in doing so they seem to inevitably take away the wrong message of what succeeds. Here they believe the message is "style over function", when it should be "style wedded with function". But then Microsoft, like their OS, has never been good at true multitasking, and generally can only do one thing right per iteration.

I'm now using Excel on Mac, and am just amazed at how awful it is with larger spreadsheets--especially with multiple filters/hidden rows, etc. There is a considerable lag when filtering and stuttering even with just scrolling. I just had a major spreadsheet become corrupted. This is on a Macbook Air not even a year old using MS Office 2011, and I've used even larger spreadsheets with no problem on a Windows XP.

Comparing it to Office 2003:

For what I do, some basic things are harder to do in Calc than in Excel. Gonna stick with Excel for now. My installation of Word got screwed up somehow so it crashes either every ten minutes or when I exit. Probably something to with drafts. Writer does okay dealing with the stuff I created in Word but there have been a couple minor oddities, like bullets and numbering not behaving in quite the way I want. And the ribbon... sheesh.

Given that Word is the default editor for Outlook, I had to disable that function since it crashes there, too. Haven't figured out how to make Writer the editor for Outlook but it's probably some very simple setting that I missed. Would be handy for on-the-fly spell-checks and a few other features but it's not the end of the world to not have it.

Overall, LibreOffice seems to be perfectly serviceable. Like anything else, just gotta get used to the slightly different way of doing things.

And hey - the price is right. ; )

I've tried both Open Office and LibreOffice and just can't seem to like either one of them compared to the Ribbon UI in MS Office, I always have the latest version of office and it's been great for me so far. Now if only there was a better email client than Outlook.

I use Microsoft Office at work, but I prefer LibreOffice for home use. I do own Office 2010 personally but have never gotten around to installing it even once because of the activation schlep - and since I constantly wipe my internet computer (since I don't believe "online" and "secure" can co-exist for long) I do reinstall LibreOffice quite often, which is a breeze.

I think Microsoft will have to realise that a lot of home users may be young students or old pensioners, neither of whom have the money to throw at a product like Office 365. I'd recommend they make Office free for home users (as well as DRM-free) and get the corporates to "rent" their software in the future.

I had just donated $50 to The Document Foundation a couple of weeks ago and then happened to visit another DRM-free bastion, Cakewalk, only discover that they've now embraced the dark side and chosen to add DRM to the latest version of Sonar. It was a sad discovery indeed and I will be saying farewell to them... but it made me feel so much better about that donation I'd just made.

Chocolate in store: $3
Beer when going out: $7-10
Office 365 subscription per month per system: $2

Yep, students don't have money.

I've had a look and I see "Microsoft Office 365 - Home 1 Year Subscription" listed at R729 (my local currency), which is approximately $62.41 using today's exchange rate and works out to about $5.20 per month. It's indicated as being for 5 devices, so you could argue that a family with 3 kids would each only be paying an effective $1.04 per month.

And I'd agree, that would be cheap to me.

But I'm not a kid in a poor family, and in my part of the world, there are a lot of families struggling to make ends meet.

But let's look at it from Microsoft's perspective. They need to stay relevant in a market where free alternatives (never mind drm-free alternatives) now exist. Sure, I do prefer Excel's editing more that Calc's, but both do the job once you know how they work.

So hook the students into the product at a young age by providing it for free, then they'll be happy to punt using the non-free corporate version during their working lives, and reward their loyalty by allowing them to use the product during retirement for free.

Or you could just use LibreOffice now for free, and donate some of the money you've saved to The Document Foundation.

I've saw this LibreOffice on my linux, but I still haven't used it. I used OpenOffice on an old Debian or Lubuntu, can't remember and find it a little hard when I had to enter some heavy equations. I know that OO became oracle and a big part of the team went to LO and now after a while which one is best (if you used both recently) and how are they comparing to the free Kings Office edition and the relatively new MS Office Online ?

Yep, that is what I meant, utilising the license across the family.

Yes, that's the underhanded tactic Microsoft is using to push their products to be quasi-standards. When I was at school we had a "computer class" where we learned how to write text, make spreadsheets and create presentations. Of course using Microsoft Office. You know all those children would grow up to use Microsoft Office later in life.

I don't want to bash MS Office, I'm sure it has some features that other programs lack and stuff. But come on, don't tell me an 8th grad computer class really needs those features. At work I equip every computer with Libre Office by default, if people really need MS Office they can get it later. In most cases though Libre Office gets the job done just fine.

So you were referring to me in your original statement.

In that case, I double-dare you disprove my original claims.

While not an expert, I have used both products for several years and transitioned between the two. That gives me an empirical perspective on the subject matter.

Too easy to just poke a finger at someone with meaningless one-liners. Think your some kind of authority on the subject matter? Then get into the discussion. Put some skin in the game.

Calling someone a FUD without backing your claim is a FUD.

Also: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzdykNa2IBU&feature=player_embedded

1) That's for students.
2) It won't run on Linux
3) Why would I continuously pay money for a new version of a product when the old version does everything I need?

Okay, cool, but if you take a good look, their original open source projects tend to be about their stuff.

For the more generic platform-agnostic ones, they've shown that they can use fork.

Sure, you got a popular open-source project that people use and you want to support it for your platform. That doesn't make you a genuine backer of open-source projects, it just means you are afraid people will move away from your platform if you don't support it.

At this point, Open-source tools are a big enough deal that even Microsoft can't afford to ignore them.