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[Sensei]

When I built my new gaming computer this summer, I finally ran out of Microsoft Office installs. I installed OpenOffice, and it was great, until I had to print worksheets for chemistry class. I realized that some things which must have been esoteric objects in the original MS Word docx file are omitted when the file is opened in OpenOffice. Arrows, lines, and most damming of all, chemical symbols with isotopic notation disappear. I also printed the manual to Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes, which was a PDF, and it printed horribly- the large typewriter font was automatically replaced with Times, but the spacing between letters was kept, so some letters were colliding in to one another and words had large gaps in them.

So, is there a free office program that faithfully represents Microsofts files when you open and print them?

[Sonlirain]

You could try LibreOffice.

I can't guarantee anything tho.

[Bumber]

Is there some setting you could use to get a PDF to print exactly as it shows (i.e., like an image?) I thought displaying correctly everywhere was the one thing PDF had going for it.

[Orange Wizard]

You could try LibreOffice.

I can't guarantee anything tho.

It's basically just an OpenOffice clone.

...

You could "download" and install MS Office and just never activate it. You get popups saying "YOU MUST REGISTER YOUR PRODUCT" every so often but at least you don't have to pay a bajillion dollars for the blasted thing.

Disclaimer: I am not advocating piracy, merely stating an option. In the same way that it's also an option to pay off your mortgage by becoming a meth dealer, which is a terrible idea and obviously I would never encourage it, but it'd work, strictly speaking.

[Mesa]

LO is a fork of OpenOffice, but I can vouch for it being pretty competent at what it does, although as a Linux user I can't not admit that I do miss some of MSO's features, but it's still decent, and free (and no, I don't consider MSO to be "free" whether you pirate it or not). I have little to no experience with PDFs and printing as my printer has been broken for as long as I can remember, and even when it was functional it was mostly my family who used it.

[Thief^]

LibreOffice's main difference when it was created was integrating a bucketload of MS compatibility patches that OO had been sitting on. It's worth a shot.

Opening a PDF inside an editor like OO just to print it is asking for trouble. Use a dedicated pdf reader.

[Flying Dice]

Yeah, just use one of the innumerable PDF readers out there instead of opening them in OO Writer or whatever.

[gimlet]

Microsoft has free downloads for at least Excel, Powerpoint and Word to view documents, I *think* they let you print too:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/891090 - Word viewer
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=10 - Excel viewer

They have a free online version of Office too, I haven't tried it though:
https://www.office.com/

[Flying Dice]

Also, if you're doing this for university, there's a good chance that they'll have MSOffice available through their virtual desktop setup for students, if they have such a thing at all.

[wierd]

rlogin on a university machine? what is this, the 80s again?

These days, having a virtual desktop system open to anonymous university student access is a guaranteed way to have porn hosts, and worse, running on university property. I can't imagine a competent university IT staff ever considering it a good idea.

OO and LO both are missing functionality from MS Office when it comes to vectorized markup goodies, like charts, tables, lineart additions, etc.  Calc vs Excel also has some warts, like missing scripting functionality.

For most basic workloads, "Hey dog, I need to make a paper for class.", etc-- OO and LO are just great.

Before those two, there were other free offices though. The grandparent of both LO and OO was Star Office. Then there is Abiword.

Remember though, MS likes to include proprietary features that have patents and trademarks attached to them, making it very difficult to clone them. That's one of the reasons why LO and OO dont have some of the functionality. ANother, is because the developers for the free office clones know better than to include those features. (Like office macros)

[Djohaal]

I've tried to switch to open office and libre office a few times but the compatibility issues just kept making my life miserable. I just said fuck it and use questionable copies of office. 

[SirQuiamus]

Have you tried L^AT_EX ?

[Sensei]

Well, I ended up bumming a legit MS Office install off a friend.

Hard to believe that for all the antitrust litigation against Microsoft for bundling Office and Explorer, I still can't seem to find a third party program that opens their document files without the grids and symbols going poof.

[Bumber]

These days, having a virtual desktop system open to anonymous university student access is a guaranteed way to have porn hosts, and worse, running on university property. I can't imagine a competent university IT staff ever considering it a good idea.

Generally you need to login with your student account.

[wierd]

Unless the virtual desktop is monitored routinely for aberrent behavior, it quickly becomes a virtual server if the student finds a way to escallate user privs.

Even without increased user privs, things like torrent clients and file shares can be turned on with limited user credentials. This means that virtual servers of a more contained but still liability inducing nature can be operated on university property.

Take for instance, the default behavior of windows and NTFS file security. If you are the owner, you have sufficient rights to the filesystem objects to be able to share it. If you share it with the "everyone" user, then connecting users no longer need to provide credentials to access the share. Access over SMB protocol would be expectedly normal behavior from the host, so unless a lot of activity causes the admin team to get suspicious, nobody would think to check. 

Running a user mode http server, or the like, and using an alternative port and pretending to be some other kind of traffic, may likewise enable the now "virtual serverized" virtual desktop to be used for all kinds of things, such as torrenting. (EG, the student sets up the usermode torrent client, instructs it to save files into the folder he has created and shared with "everyone", then simply pulls the completed files off the university network later over SMB, and nobody is the wiser. Especially if he throttles the download and upload speeds, and uses encryption on a well known port to make it look like legit traffic to automated alerting tools.)

Passing illegal copies of Ms Office, or games, or whatever with other students in this way suddenly becomes very real as a prospect, and something that simply giving virtual terminal access to students at large would enable.

The student agreement for proper use of university resources only indemnifies the university to a certain point.
Many students dont give a rat's ass about complying with said agreement.

The best solution, from a network admin POV, is to deny access, and only provide when a genuine need is presented, and the on an as-needed, per user manner.