Office & productivity software forum: Would you consider ditching Microsoft Word for Google Docs?

MS Office is the business standard because they give free or reduced price copies to educational institutions in order to "hook" users on their product (not unlike drug pushers). Once you're hooked, it's really hard to change. Genius marketing.

No.

I would continue using Word Perfect which is STILL a better word processing tool than Word has ever been. For my friends/clients/associates who insist on Word format documents, it saves them properly too (sometimes better than Word does). It has more user controls, more accessible editing tools, and is, simply, a better word processor.

MS Word isn't the most popular because it is better, it just has better promotion.

Google Docs...well....probably not.

I'll stay with it.

I will stay with Microsoft Word for several reasons:

It is the best, most widely used and respected word processor.

In some countries, like here in New Zealand, broadband is not nearly as fast as in the US and most European countries.

Broadband is expensive in New Zealand so most non-commercial computer users have monthly data caps in order to keep costs reasonable. Although word processor documents are not usually large, keeping any/all usage under control is prudent in order to avoid extra charges at month-end.

As many respondents have mentioned, Open Office has been my office program of choice for several years. Light, flexible, might could use a few more options, but I don't have that particular need as yet.

What I DO prefer is the option to NOT have to repeatedly re-set all the variations of Outlook! I have been 'forced' to play with several versions of Outlook at work, and have yet to be satisfied with the downright assinine attitude MS puts into that program that demands you acquiesce control to them! Even now, after having deleted every possible reference I can locate concerning MSOffice/Outlook on my home machine, I STILL have to cancel a 'pop-up' every time I reboot. It wants to "clean up" my emails for me, and I have NEVER used it here!

But, I digress. The idea of all of my word docs being maintained in a cloud is something I'm not yet comfortable with...I only this year felt at ease with online bill paying, and I do NOT let my bank do it 'for me'. "Cloud Computing" to me is just a fancy name for letting someone else maintain a randomized server bank for storage. Doesn't yet make my heart feel warm and fuzzy...I prefer my own back-up systems.

I have never had the "pleasure" of having MS Word installed on any computer I have ever owned. For a word processor, I have always used MS Works and have had no issue with it. When my computer has Word as factory installed software, I take it out and install Works in it's place. I just prefer it over the complicated MS Word.

I've got a few documents that are fairly complicated by their nature. Lots of tables, graphics and such. They're set up for printing using MS Word. No matter which alternative I've ever tried, the tables wind up on more than one page, the graphics wind up wonky and I really don't have the time nor interest in mucking about with them.

Word also has macro features that tie into other applications I use - and those are NOT available in the "alternatives".
So, no.. Google Docs and Open/Libre office is NOT an option.

Hell NO!! MS Word Does NOT spy on you!! All my documents in my purchased MS Word are stored on my PC and is not shared with anyone unless I choose to share. Google has a very bad track record of spying and when you save your documents, it's to their web site, not yours, they have the power to do whatever they choose to do with your documents. Word really isn't that expensive, unless you require more than Home & Student version. Since I use my Word software for profit enterprise, I own the Home & Business software version. Whatever I write belongs to me to use or share as I Please. Good Luck with all that "FREE" software, you get what you pay (or don't) for!!

I use Word, Excel (with macros), Powerpoint, Visio, Outlook. They're intregrated. Single vendor supported. Dependable. I also use SQL-Server and Visual Studio and export/import data between Excel and SQL-Server, etc. ... all of which is fully supported by the MS intregrated product lines.

I don't do much 'fancy' in them weird formatting, data merging) but I do like having a single suite that does it all ... and so does every company I've worked for (and my entire state government).

To top it all off, many people can get the basic MS Office suite free thru their company or at a very reasonable price (i.e.: the Student Edition).

Microsoft drove a superior product (WordPerfect) out of business with their bundled marketing practices. I'm all for free enterprise, but Word was a very inferior product. I'm tired of Microsoft software trying to predict my intentions and not making it easy for me to do it my way. Anytime I have the opportunity to use something other than Microsoft Office I jump at the chance. The Open Office Suite has worked very well and I'm hopeful Google Docs will be an equally fine product.

JMG

Various Versions of MS Word have we used. (Sorry been watching Lord of the Rings). We'll start again.


We have used various versions of MS Word - Like them, although frustrated by Microsoft Placing Commands in new places each time a new version come out - Like a treasure hunt for what you already knew and used heavily - A weird Game to play on those who provided MS with the funds to produce the newer versions.

The Free Open Office - (Star Office of Sun MicroSystems fame) is an adequate and competent package. My wife loves it. Nothing bad to say about it at all - It can't be considered a "good buy" since it costs nothing to buy.

When it comes to the convenience of using the "Cloud" (that place where you store information you wish to retrieve anywhere you have an internet connection)

We are of the OLD SCHOOL we do not allow any DATA to be connected to the internet that should not be placed in somebody elses hands. Any DATA connected is FALSE DATA mixed with de-classified data already in the Public Domain. Hackers are so good these days, and so many of them, that it would be folly to place anything in/on the "Cloud" that you do not want given to those who may cause you harm.

The break from the Internet should be physical - Do not rely of any Computer Programme telling you you are safely disconnected. We, and you, can make computers say anything we want.

Yours (slightly paranoid)

Old Gen4

GOOGLE DOCS IS STILL TO UNFORMED AND UNUTILITARIAN....

I ditched Microsoft Office all the way back in 1998 in favour of Lotus SmartSuite, mainly because I was at University and our University was still using Office 6.x or something really old like that, and we had major problems that the copy Microsoft were selling to us students was the latest, and when we were taking documents home we were finding that bringing them back into University once they'd been converted we couldn't use them again, and Microsoft wouldn't sell us the version of Office to match the Universities, which was just really infuriating, it wasn't our fault that the University wouldn't shell out for the latest version of Office (there computers were still running Windows 3.11 up until 1999 - apparently they upgraded them when we left in 1999) but we were being penalised for it.

Thankfully along came SmartSuite which was given away on a free PC Plus magazine disc. The good thing with this was that you could export your documents back to the old Microsoft Word format and still use them at Uni as well as edit them at home, plus as an added advantage PC Plus give it away free - ok it was an older version of the software with an option to upgrade, but it was only £4.99 for the magazine and it worked with the Universities software so it was a perfect solution (other than trying to track down an illegal copy of Office 6.0).

The other good thing I found with SmartSuite over Office was that it's presentation software actually worked, and you could package your presentation into an executable file that could be run in MS-DOS. This was brilliant because at University during the major final assignment we were banned from using PowerPoint for the presentation (this was on a HND in Software Engineering course believe it or not!), due to the amount of times students had got in there, got it all set up and then just be greeted by the dreaded Microsoft error message and them to be left with nothing. However because SmartSuite's presentation package produced an MS-DOS executable, it was all a self-contained package running on a system which other than a few TSR's had absolutely nothing else to interfere with it, so it was far more stable and I used this to do my presentation which worked far better than others who had ignored the ruling and attempted to produce a Powerpoint presentation.

Lotus Smartsuite may have disappeared, I think the millennium edition was the last version that I ever remember being produced, but then along came OpenOffice.

Since then I've always used OpenOffice rather than Microsoft, it does exactly the same job as Microsoft, the only one piece of software that is missing is Microsoft Publisher, but even with that there is a number of other GPL based DTP packages available for free that can be just as good or better than MS Pub.

As for Google Documents. I like the idea, it is good but don't like using it at the moment. The main thing that I'm not too keen on Google Documents is the fact that when you save your document it always saves it online. You can physically save it to your hard disk, but there doesn't appear to be any all in one backup option to backup everything within your Google documents automatically. This I find very insecure because if anything does happen to Google then all document stored there would be wiped out. You would hope that considering the size of Google that nothing would happen to them, but as we know major companies can quite easily make the wrong decisions and come and go at the blink of an eye, before anyone even has time to realise what is going on, take some pre-major electronics companies that have come and gone in the past as example - Nokia - in the 1990's when everyone was walking round with Nokia phones and Nokia had numerous members of Club Nokia and was running the Nokia game no-one would have imagined a day when all the other mobile manufacturers were easily exceeding Nokia's sales, but Nokia made the mistake of constantly supporting Symbian and ignoring the fact the world had moved on to OS's like Android and iOS and Symbian was left far behind, or Motorola - again they made some really good tech in the 00's but again they too got complacent that people would buy their stuff just 'cos it had a Motorola logo on it, even producing a phone that featured diamonds and was out of the price range of everyone, and then trying to sell 3G enabled phones like the A1200 to 3rd world countries whilst leaving countries like the UK and US with the older version A920's and A1000. Hopefully Google might be like Acorn/ARM and be able to constantly redevelop itself time and time again, but you never know when that day will come when Google takes it's eye of the ball, and that's the time when people with documents in Google Docs will have major problems.

I like the functionality in MS Word.

>"Can open office read .doc files and can MS Word read docs created by Open Office? IOW, does it save docs w. a ".doc" extension?"<

Yes, Open Office Writer can read .doc files. Yes, MS Word can read docs created by Open Office Writer. Open Office Writer can save docs with quite a few of the more popular extensions. For more information please see the Open Office website. For information on its successor's site please see the LibreOffice website.

I hope this helps. Good Luck!

Google Docs are only supported on the latest two versions of popular browsers. What happens when your browser is out of date one morning... and you can't upgrade it on your system... and you can't upgrade your system on your 5 year old computer....And you've come to rely on Google Docs...? You're screwed!