- Joined
- Apr 30, 2023
It was dead simple to get a free copy of Office 97, 2000, or XP going. We used to burn a copy that we got for friends.If you couldn't afford the $400 license for Office 2003/2007/2010, and you found Microsoft Works fucking useless, then OpenOffice.org was basically the "go-to." Not just on Linux, but also Windows and OSX.
Later when I was trying to run stuff on Linux Abiword was both more compatible and much faster than OpenOffice which was notorious for using a ton of RAM. Most people at home had limited use for Excel, presentations had a bit of niche at school.
It wasn't until Office 2007 and the advent of the xml based formats like docx that things got more messy. It isn't straightforward to pirate Office 2007 onward, and because of docx you couldn't limp along with the copy of Office 2000 you'd gotten from a neighbor years ago. But that's around the time google docs kinda ate their lunch for home use.
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