Is there a good cheap or free alternative to MS Office and Word in particular that is compatible with Word .docx files?
 
Thanks for the help.
 
Julien

Try Open Office https://www.openoffice.org/ It's what I use at home and seems to open Word docs just fine.

Libre may also be a good choice: http://www.libreoffice.org/
 
My daughter's cyber-school uses it instead of Office, and from what I've seen (doc and ppt equivalents) it's pretty decent.
 

Thanks, I will check them both out.
 
My computer has been acting a little "hinky" so I looked in Task Manager. There were over 10 instances of something related to Google Chrome (which I HAD.. but never really used). Something called Lwemjcwrnvf.exe I Googled it and got NO results. Every time I tried to stop it from running in Task Manager I could stop a couple of instances and then about 20 more would start running, they were using a lot of memory too. I deleted GC, but they kept going, rebooted and they are gone, at least for now. The laptop is running a lot better. Right now I have, when looking at all users, 13 instances of svchost.exe, I have this one window open and am running nothing other than the stuff that runs al the time like Norton 360, Panicware Popup Blocker, biometrics, etc. When I check just my username there are NO scvhost.exe running. I guess that is normal but Chrome was eating up a lot of power and was not even in use, at least I didn't think it was. I don't trust Google...
 
Anyway, sorry for getting off topic. I think I will post the computer stuff in the Computer forum but I wanted to mention it here too. Thanks again for the Word alternative recommends!
 
Julien

I've tried all above suggestions; have been using both Libre and Open for quite a long time. 

I came across another by KingSoft, they have paid and free versions. Link to free version of Writer . I installed this in 'Classic Mode', it looks and operates very much like the old MS-Word. IIRC; no issues; no crashes, no annoying bugs, it does have auto-update by default which can be turned off. KingSoft Writer has other nice options such as; export as PDF, it will open and save all common / relative file formats including doc and docx.


Kingsoft also has the 'Office Suite', so, if you want more than just Writer (word), then this might be for you. Anyway, there's a lot of choices there, read the information on their site (KingSoft) and try, then either buy or get the totally free version(s)! I have not used Open or Libre since installing KingSoft Writer.
 
 
 
 

i use open office.
works great.
 
 

If I'm not mistaken Libre Office is a fork of open office but gets more regular updates. I own MS office but uninstalled due to bloat. Libre Office works just fine for me.

The only problem you are likely to have with Openoffice/LibreOffice is with translations of some docx formatting. If you just need a word processor, either one will work fine by itself, but if you are sending docx files back and forth to someone who is not willing to work through the potential formatting problems when they open complex docs at either end in a different program, then you may be forced to use MS Office as millions of others have been over the last few decades in order to maintain brainless comparability with the de facto standard.

Yeah, I have Libre on a couple of older PCs that use Fedora 20 (Linux). I didn't think it would open MS Office docs? I've never tried to use it with MS office, but I thought I read that somewhere...Open Office seems to work just fine with everything I've tried it on, but I haven't really put it through a good test. 

Thanks again, I'll get one or the other, maybe try all three!
J