A rarity now: Older Windows 7 notebooks sometimes have an MS Office 2010 starter with Word and Excel installed by the device manufacturer, which omits some functions and displays advertising. The apps for iPod touch, iPhone and iPad can be used free of charge depending on the size of the device.

You can use the latter free of charge, at least to a limited extent: In addition to test versions (which can easily be downloaded using the Windows ISO Downloader), there are web app versions with reduced functions that require a Microsoft email address.

OpenOffice and LibreOffice can be installed as full versions without any investment of money – in contrast to MS Office. This constellation may cost a little more storage space. However, you as the user can easily have both suites on the disk. They want to work together so that users get the best overall package. LibreOffice is based on OpenOffice, in an open letter the developers of the Libre package indirectly demanded the end of the sibling program. Incidentally, the suites celebrated an anniversary in 2020: LibreOffice celebrated its tenth anniversary, OpenOffice doubled its running time. According to the changelog, the latter update closes two security gaps, adjusts the font size for help texts, adds a new function to the “Insert” menu, adds a PDF export icon to the “File” menu, brings new security warnings and fixes a memory error in the ODS file format. In 2020 there was only one (minor) update to version 4.1.8. OpenOffice hasn’t received major updates for years. Performance optimizations are moving in, which accelerate the opening of files in different formats and benefit from a solid PDF export speed. It brings improvements to Writer, Calc, Impress and Draw. Minor updates followed in 2021, and program version 7.3 was released in 2022. Version (major release) 7 in August 2020 improved compatibility with the MS Office formats of Word, Excel and PowerPoint. For LibreOffice there are always smaller updates coming out – and bigger ones.

Open office and libreoffice