Microsoft Office vs Use the free versions?

I'm a student right now, so i can buy Microsoft Office for a discounted price, $40, for the most updated version. Is it worth it to buy Microsoft Office, or should i just save money and use the free legal word processors out there? There is another thing to consider, that there are computers at my school that have Word, so it might be a waste of money since i could use Word there. But school closes early on friday and is closed saturday and sunday, and also closed on certain holidays. What do you people think? What should i do?

@hydralisk86: I have been using OpenOffice for years and never had any issues. You can also use the MS document formats as well.

Libre/Open Office works great. My only gripe is Microsoft-centeric: it's still an MS-Office world and *sometimes* formatting from Libre doesn't carry over perfectly when someone with true MS Office opens something. Spreadsheet stuff (graphs, etc) seem more finicky than Word. So - it's somewhat tricky in the professional world where, for example, grants have VERY (RIDICULOUSLY) strict formatting and font guidelines and the open-source Offices just don't cut it. Also, if you use citation-management software - like Mendeley - my experience is that it works just as well in Libre/Open, but can't be used in MS Office. That is, god forbid you want to continue your research paper on a different machine with MS Office. You're stuck because really weird stuff can happen with the in-text citations than can set you back bigtime.

TLDR: if you're writing and submitting homework assignments, you probably don't need to pay for MS Office. But it's still not 100% avoidable in the working world (at least in some professions)

I believe MS offers Office 365 for free if you're a student. You can Google "free ms office for students" or check the following link:

https://products.office.com/en-us/student/office-in-education

From what I understand, so long as you have a valid @.edu email address, you can pretty much download it for free.

Microsoft Office in undoubtedly better then the free versions. That isn't to say that the free versions won't get the job done and do it just as well. They just aren't quite a polished and the formatting can sometimes be a little fidgety. For $40 I would definitely pick up a copy of office.

I'd get office, it's just less of a hassle than dealing with other solutions.

If you want to stick with MS Office for free, you can use the web browser-based versions of Word, Powerpoint, and Excel. You do need to sign in with a MS account though.

For the alternatives, I'd use Libre Office. I like to wrap text around my images, graphs, and charts when using MS Office. Only Libre Office seems to get the formatting right.

Personally, I also prefer to have the full offline version of MS Office and not have to worry.

For $40 of course go Office.

OpenOffice is pretty good. I used it for 2 years. Just be sure to save the documents in the MS Office formats, or else they may not be exactly compatible with MS Office at your school's PCs or anywhere else.

recently started using open office and its great for what I ask of it

openOffice is great. But if you can get Microsoft Office for $40 you should definitely do it. There will be no compatibility issues at all if you just use the business standard which is Microsoft.

@hydralisk86: You can also get the university version which is 79.99 and it will last you 4 years.

If you only want Word then go with Open Office. Want to use Powerpoint? Stay far away from the crappy Open Office version. It's complete shit.

@nethernova: it works fine but the formatting is absolutely wonkered when going to or from MS ppt. Word is really the only one that's got OK compatibility with formatting (as noted above, I still can't count on it for very strict professional guidelines - margins, line spacing, etc aren't always quite right when loaded in another program).