OFFICE SOFTWARE
Best program: Libreoffice www.libreoffice.org Latest major version: 5.0
The cheapest legal way to get Microsoft Office is to pay an annual subscription of £59.99. For a free alternative try the open-source Libreoffice, which offers similar functions to Office and now supports all its file formats, including Word documents (DOCX) and Excel spreadsheets (XLSX). The only thing it’ll cost you is more than 500MB of hard-drive space. Actually it doesn’t have to – because unlike Microsoft Office, Libreoffice has a portable version ( www.snipca.com/24009) that you can run from a USB stick.
Best hidden tools
There’s a hidden sidebar of tools in Libreoffice’s Word equivalent Writer. To enable it, click View, then Sidebar. You can then open a second box of commands by clicking a corresponding icon. If this makes the window too cluttered, click the arrow on the border to open and close the sidebar, or shift it to your desktop by clicking its menu icon then clicking Undock.
Use the Insert menu to embed PDFS, graphs, photos, scans and videos (WMA or AVI) into your documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Right-click the inserted item for options such as Insert Caption, Wrap and ‘Edit with External Tool’ (see screenshot above).
Also try: Scribus www.scribus.net
Libreoffice Writer has enough features to almost qualify as a desktop-publishing (DTP) tool. But the gold standard for open-source DTP is Scribus. It’s easy to learn and hard to master, like all the most powerful software, and offers professionallevel tools for creating magazines, leaflets and ebooks - although Scribus users are still waiting for an EPUB export option ( www.snipca.com/24013).
Don’t use: WPS Office
Formerly known as Kingsoft Office this is much smaller than Libreoffice, Scribus and Office, but its free version is full of annoying limitations. For example, it adds a watermark to your exported PDFS.