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Office suite for my mom?

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cmpm:
funny I've found the opposite - I mean Open Office (2) files' formatting getting screwed up when opened in Word... but cant remember what exactly the problem was anymore (lets see: colour highlighting being lost, stuff going from one page to two, loosing correct indentation - but cant remember the exact details)...havent had any problems with Textmaker but then I dont need to use it a lot so you could say I dont actually test it that much :)
-tomos (January 01, 2008, 06:25 AM)
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You can save an OO document as a MS Word Doc or any of the formats offered in the save as file type drop-down menu. If that helps with all that you have there tomos.

I had to e-mail a homework project made in OO to my son and he had me save it as a Word Doc in order for the formatting to be correct. (He had forgotten to take it with him)

But I'd certainly go for that student discount deal on ms office.
It would be worth it just to have it.

Darwin:
There are niggles with SoftMaker components - particularly opening Excel 2003 files (I also recall an issue or two with Word documents but can't remember specifics, so could just be a trick of the memory!). The far bigger issue in Chris' case is layout and menus - that's where Star/OpenOffice are more "like" MS Office and would, I think, be easier to provide assistance with from afar. Having said that, I'll stress again that for light footprint and general usage where the level of computer knowledge (on the part of the user) is good, my vote would go for Ashampoo/Softmaker as well. Their stuff is really well thought out and presented, the support forum is active and frequented by support staff, and the product is actively developed, which means that bug fixes are released quite frequently.

Of course, for a PhD candidate whose needs extend beyond simple word processing, I would HIGHLY recommend MS Office Student and Teacher edition, simply because that will result in the least amount of compatibility issues when sharing files with fellow students, supervisors, submitting presentations for conferences, etc, etc.

Curt:
..., my vote would go for Ashampoo/Softmaker as well. -Darwin (January 01, 2008, 10:53 AM)
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I should mention that I have not been able to update my Ashampoo version via SoftMaker (SoftMaker updates more often), and the price on the Softmaker is $80 compared to Ashampo's $60 ($24 in my case), so they are not all identical. If price doesn't matter too much I would recommend SoftMaker (Edit: - for non-US resident non-students/teachers, that is - otherwise MS Office 2007 is the logical choice).

Darwin:
Hmm... I just took advantage of the giveaway through VUNet posted above, to see if it works still and it does. I was also able to update the Ashampoo version using the Help - Update feature which took me to the SoftMaker website. I downloaded and updated without any trouble.

tomos:
Hmm... I just took advantage of the giveaway through VUNet posted above, to see if it works still and it does. I was also able to update the Ashampoo version using the Help - Update feature which took me to the SoftMaker website. I downloaded and updated without any trouble.
-Darwin (January 01, 2008, 12:10 PM)
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Mike - do you need to install it fully before getting the key?
When you say update - do you mean updates for the 2006 version (which is the download)
I wonder can you update to 2008 version, probably wouldnt bother myself anyways (cause I have it already and only wanted to put this on an old laptop...)

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