Reliable alternative to Word?

Question

A friend of mine lost a big Word document. The IT dep't could only provide the version that was backed up a week ago.

Is there a more reliable alternative to Word? Is OpenOffice more heavy-duty?

Answer 1

Whatever you use, data loss is always an option. So pick your software after what features you need, and keep backups anyway. I also lost partial LaTeX documents due to stupid text editors, so don't simply assume it won't happen with another program :-)

That being said, the automatic recovery in Word (2007 in my case) never threw away more than a few lines of text. And I made it crash regularly while typing math.

Answer 2

AbiWord is a little more lightweight than the two, but as you mentioned, OpenOffice is a good alternative although little heavy duty if you just want to open some Word documents. Word itself is reliable, just ensure you always keep a backup of your important documents.

Answer 3

Word should be reliable, I would question the operating system and other software on that machine or maybe even the hardware. Is the machine normally reliable?

If your looking for alternatives anyway, the open office suite is widely used. I used it a few years ago and it seemed pretty good to me, I always end up going back to Word though.

Answer 4

Typically, Word can be very reliable. However, you might need to tweak the standard settings. You an set Word to 'Auto-Save' every 5 to 10 minutes which allows an 'Auto-recover' if something happens.

Note: Auto-Save only works on documents that have already been saved with a file name. If you do that, you should have no issues recovering the file.

Let me know if this helps!

JFV

Answer 5

Openoffice.org

Has always been a good alternative, since the 3.0 release has been even better.

How does Writer work compared to Word? Writer is the word processor that comes with OpenOffice. Everything I did in Word, I can do in Writer. Changing the load and save options makes it easy for a Word user to automatically use Writer and still keep documents etc in a compatible Microsoft format. You can easily set the Options > Load / Save.

OpenOffice: What to know before making the transition from Microsoft Office

Open office download

Answer 6

Jarte is a word processor which handles Microsoft Word 95, 97, 2000 documents, rich text format (RTF) documents and plain text (ASCII) documents. It boasts of a good user interface which is easy to use as well. Jarte also has a plus version which has more features, but not a freeware.

(or)

Ultra-Pad is a freeware advanced Word Processor Application for Windows 95 and later. It features some of the most advanced features you would ever want in a Word Processor. Ultra-pad is skinnable software and there are themes available for download to change the looks. You can download Ultrapad from here.