[kklenz]

Hi, I just got a new G5 iMac and I'm trying out that free 30-day Microsoft Office that came with it. I have used it to open word attachments in my emails. After 30 days I will have to shell out $$$ for Office, so I'm wondering if I can use Openoffice or Maclinkplus instead to open Word documents. Any pro-cons, advice or suggestions will be helpful. Thanks.

[larkost]

For the majority of Word documents out there TextEdit will open them just fine. In fact the majority of Word documents should never have been saved as Word documents, but should have been saved as RTF files (that everything under the sun can read, rather than "requiring" a $300 piece of software). The really complex ones (charts, excel tables, stuff with ActiveX), or documents that use complex tables or the versioning system will not open right, but how often do you see that?

[TETENAL]

Originally posted by larkost:
In fact the majority of Word documents should never have been saved as Word documents, but should have been saved as RTF files (that everything under the sun can read, rather than "requiring" a $300 piece of software).

So true, but many people somehow assume that everybody "just has it" – as if that was a law of nature.

TextEdit can open Word documents, but loses embedded pictures and a lot of the formatting. OpenOffice.org can open Word documents and Pages can do so as well. An iMac probably came with AppleWorks. That should also be able to import Word documents.