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Microsoft Word for Mac?

J

jmy2469

macrumors member
Original poster
Looking for a program that I can just use to save files in Microsoft Word format? Any free ones out there? Thanks for the help.
 
I installed Office 2011 for my wife for $10 through a home use program at work. I felt I had spent $10 too much. It was bloated. It added clutter to her dock. It took over file associations for everything under the sun. It corrupted fonts LibreOffice needed and I had to reinstall LibreOffice to get it working after installing Office 2011. The biggest headache was activation. Why should I have to activate an office suite? I can see activating some $50,000 computational fluid dynamics software but this is an office suite we're talking about here.

I don't like Office 2011. I don't like 2007 (or 2003 for that matter) on Windows either. I played with Office 2010 on a friend's PC and it had taken over the file association for OpenOffice (odt) text documents! What in the ?!?The last MS Office suite I liked was 97. Everything since then has added more bloat than features. Now I have to admit that back in the day, I hated Apple Quicktime on Windows because it came along and stole file associations for image files from other programs. I mean you installed it to watch mov files but it insisted on opening gif and jpg files. But the king of file association theft these days is Microsoft. On my wife's mini, when I restored the OS, it put back a trial of Office 2004. I then installed LibreOffice and you would think when she gets an xls or doc in an email it would open LibreOffice, right? No. She gets a popup that you can't run power pc apps on Lion because friggin' Office 2004 Trial is associated with all MS file formats. I had to drag the darn thing to the trash (good riddance) to get LibreOffice working for her.

I also own iWork and it does very well opening and saving Office docs. One caveat is there will be a handful of files that won't open properly. When I get one of those, between iWork and LibreOffice I get it open without resorting to MS software.

Start with LibreOffice. If you think you need more, try iWork. I would get Office 2011 only as a last resort.
 
I thought that Open Office, um, closed down and was renamed Libre Office. Is that not the case? (no time to search right now)
 
miles01110 said:
Office 2011 works great.
Click to expand...

I second this. I have had zero issue with Office. You know you can easily remove dock clutter if you do not want it there right???

I also think Pages is a great program, possibly better than word if you are not moving between a mac and pc a lot. It can save as a word document, pdf, etc.
 
r0k said:
I then installed LibreOffice and you would think when she gets an xls or doc in an email it would open LibreOffice, right? No. She gets a popup that you can't run power pc apps on Lion because friggin' Office 2004 Trial is associated with all MS file formats. I had to drag the darn thing to the trash (good riddance) to get LibreOffice working for her.
Click to expand...

For future reference: click on file, do Get Info, go to the Open With section and select what you want the file to open with, click the Change All button.

--Eric
 
Eric5h5 said:
For future reference: click on file, do Get Info, go to the Open With section and select what you want the file to open with, click the Change All button.

--Eric
Click to expand...

Been there. Did that. Shouldn't have had to do it more than once. When I say a program is "association stealing" I mean that I observed or suspected it was resetting my preferences behind my back. On OS X, I feel like I have control of every aspect of the OS. If I change something, it stays changed. If I repair something, it stays repaired. What used to drive me crazy with Windows was it seemed like a dark alley where nefarious agents were sneaking around changing settings without my knowledge or consent. The registry gets accessed 14,000 times a SECOND. I'm not changing a darn thing but some process in the OS needs to open that thing up almost continuously. By contrast, info.plist files are inside the app bundles they came with and are AFAIK never touched by other apps.

When Office 2004 somehow had itself associated with MS Office files AFTER I installed LibreOffice, some of the blame goes to the LibreOffice installer for not putting things right during its install. But I'm still SO glad OS X no longer comes with trialware from Microsoft.
 
Last edited:
jmy2469 said:
Looking for a program that I can just use to save files in Microsoft Word format? Any free ones out there? Thanks for the help.
Click to expand...

If you don't need to deal with images, TextEdit comes with every Mac and can save as .doc or .docx formats.
 
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