Is Google Docs or Open Office any real substitute for Microsoft Word?

Do they enable you to do the same things you can do on Word or are the features much more limited?


Thanks!|||Don鈥檛 even go there!





In an ideal world we would all convert to LPG for our vehicles, and look where that went. The less people who participate, the less of an advantage being part of, is.





Stick with something you know will be compatible with the masses, unless that is you have the time to protest against the monopoly Microsoft have at the moment. And unless you鈥檙e an activist, I would advise you stay with MS Word.





Principle and politics are for another day.





I would not agree that any of these applications are best of better, but that MS word is, as it is, the market bench mark.





If you want to protest against MS monopoly and unfair trading, then just borrow a copy.





People, who resent MS for their monopoly, will swear by the others. By doing that, they will be biased against MS Word, and give you false advice. Fact is, if you want the compatibility, MS is the one you have to have.|||Google Docs is much more limited than Word but OpenOffice is about the same feature wise. There are a few things that show up in one but not the other and vice versa. My biggest gripe with OpenOffice is that it's visually on the level of Word 97 even though the capabilities are far beyond that.|||OpenOffice is great, oarticularly because it's free xD


Yeah, it's a decent substitute for Word, although there may be future versions of Word that use different file types to .doc (Note - it's unlikely that this will change), which would render all previous versions of basically everything useless.


Of course if you can go about getting Word for free (LEGALLY lol) then it's going to be better - marginally - but otherwise, OpenOffice is worth your time. I haven't tried Google Docs.|||Open Office is a very good substitute for Word. If work with all of Word file extensions. Just remember to set it default to either .doc or .rtf and you will have no problems. It's tool bars and drop down menus are very much like Words. It's free, so give it a try. I think you'll be quite pleased.