Any free programs that are like Microsoft Word?

[leonheart_a]

Well if you cant download office, i have to agree with others by saying open office, it has saved me alot of times when i had my PC reformatted.

 

[Sendoh]

Is the compatibility with Openoffice any good? I've been using MSword for a research essay, it requires footnotes, automatic page numbering, and headers, and so far it's a pain in the ass because of a lot of formatting problems.

I'm using MsWord 97 (don't have anything else), and it restricts footnotes to 3 a page, and sometimes footnotes can carry over to the other page instead of reducing the text. Also, sometimes word leaves quite a significant blank space at the bottom when I don't have foot notes.

If you save a document in Openoffice, would it retain the actual document, except make it easier to format, what about vice versa, if you need to open it in MsWord?

 

[Giga_Gaia]

OpenOffice just can't open any Office 2007 files (like .docx for word 2007)

 

[FAST6191]

@Giga_Gaia I have yet to test it but:
http://download.novell.com/Download?buildid=52Yfn6nntgY~
There are also several conversion tools/sites and I seem to recall the new versions/beta having something in that arena (beta office software is not for me).

@Sendoh sometimes there are minor formatting issues when converting to and from but if you stick with odf until the time comes to change it then you should be OK. As for your requests they should be possible. It seems your projects are different in layout to those I do and those I have to help do so I am not going say without hesitation (I would be shocked if it did not though).

 

[CorruptJon]

Wordpad ftw... not cluttered with features I don't even use.

 

[Mangofett]

OpenOffice just can't open any Office 2007 files (like .docx for word 2007)

It can with a plugin, and Oo 3.0 is gonna be released soon, and has 2007 support.