On 02/05/2015 13:36, Dave Plowman (News) wrote:
In article ,
The Medway Handyman wrote:
Not so. One of the reasons I'm considering Chrome Book is the much
lower price. You can buy cheap windows laptops but the spec is low & you
have to pay extra for word, excel etc.

Open Office etc is free and is compatible with Word, etc.


I suspect that Kingsoft or one of the other Open Office packages would
be absolutely fine for what I think Dave is likely to need.

I wouldn't use it for my consultancy work because my clients use Office,
and the more advanced WORD features like tables of contents, endnotes,
cross references etc are not compatible. This matters if you are writing
or updating 50 page technical reports, it is unlikely to be a problem
for preparing specifications, advertising material, invoices, and
general correspondance.

Similarly people in the financial world who use macros in Excel
spreadsheets extensively would presumably be well advised to stick with
Office.

One merit of really cheap hardware is that it might actually be worth
buying a pair of chromebooks, that way you have an instant backup if one
dies / breaks / gets stolen. (I ended up buying a duplicate laptop
because a clients' security software trashed my first machine, resulting
in a warrenty replacement of the hard drive).