Not a total Luddite but far from a Tech geek.

So here is my story so far this weekend,
Saturday night desktop running Vista refuses to start up eventually get it working again Sunday morning no files lost, phew.
Can’t find my old copy of Office so I think no problem will treat myself and buy a new up to date copy.
It appears that Office 2013 will not work on Vista so what are my OS alternatives and how exactly does it work with regards opening a MS word file editing it then saving and e-mailing it on to someone?

Google Drive/Docs will likely work

Office 365 is your saviour.
But if you want to continue locally, you’ll need windows 7.
Vista is so bad you should do this anyway.

Apache OpenOffice and LibreOffice are both opensource and will read and save MS Office files. I use Apache OpenOffice and most of the features in a Word doc will convert perfectly but I have had problems with drawings (ie, using the drawing tools, not embedded tifs or jpgs.)

Have open office sorted out the export formatting option ?

I wrote my thesis on open office because im a cheapskate and it cause all sorts of stress when i handed im my perfectly formatted document for them to open it in real word and hand me back a bunch of pish.

Ended up redoing it in word.

Have open office sorted out the export formatting option ?

Not that I’m aware of, although to be fair to them I’m not sure if it’s Open/Libre Office’s fault, or Microsoft ignoring its own “standard”. (Although my main gripe about LO/OO is the crappy last century interface…)

To the OP: give Libre Office a go, anyway, it’s free and it might work fine for your needs. If you can export to PDF (ie whoever you’re sending the document to will accept PDF files) that will also guarantee the formatting.

I seem to recall something about new laptops all coming with Window8 now, so be careful when choosing.

As an alternative, go the route of google drive/Dropbox/Spideroak and spring for a Mac with either their office suite or MS Office on. That is likely to be far pricier than a normal Windows laptop though. It wil mean that you can feel massively smug about AV and you do get a free pair of hipster glasses with ever laptop purchased*

* I made that bit up

“I seem to recall something about new laptops all coming with Window8 now, so be careful when choosing.”

they dont ….

i bought one at xmas for my dad – windows 7 , i bought one for the mrs 3 weeks ago – windows 7.

mrs bought one for her mum going back to college – FACKING WINDOWS 8…… stupidest interface ever !

Google docs or open office etc will do the casual user. If you really want to spend cash and get the stupid ribbon interface try 2010.

As for compatibility between ms and the rest of the world it seems like a bit of both for the issues. If I was using either to prepare something important id probably export to pdf for printing or issuing etc