The time is: 4:26 AM PDT 9/1/2025 I am in Portland, Oregon 97239
Having just been firmly rebuffed by Microsoft after they completely disabled MS Word. This finally pushed me to cautiously approach downloading LibreOffice. I think I did it and while fumbling around MAY have done so a few times.
I have not understood how to write anything or how to save it. They (LibreOffice) seem very focused on single digit donations. I would happily donate $50/month cash only, by mail. That is the level of safety that I require. Otherwise they and I will NOT have a relationship. I think they are a German organization, so there could be a language barrier. I think there time is about 9 hours later than mine.
Anyone who would like to offer suggestions, I would appreciate that. Otherwise, perhaps I can find someone locally, or even travel an hour and a half one way out to Best Buy (Geek Guys???). Since they are not a Church, I am sure that there services will not be free.
If none of my efforts work, I will be back to using paper and pen and US Mail I suppose. I have not done that since the 1980s. :(
Anyone interested may contact me at BCTS.
Thank you.
Ahabidah, Gwen Brown or whatever.
PS I now run Windows 10 I think ??? and use Google Gmail. Right now Microsoft is acting like a rabid mad dog. Nothing is certain to me.
Comments
F4 Test
F4
Anne Brown could not help being doubtful. Previously she had been Andrew Blake.
This was all a test for her to see if she could carry it off.
Gwen Brown
T
F4
Anne Brown could not help being doubtful. Previously she had been Andrew Blake.
This was all a test for her to see if she could carry it off.
Gwen Brown
Free software
LibreOffice is made by a worldwide community of volunteers. There is no business behind it. This community has registered a German company to handle its financial activities, eg. donations, but that is all "official" they have.
The common language of this community is English. (Actually, these days in all but the poorest and least developed countries, and maybe ones like North Korea, English is considered a must for people below 70. In Germany it was like that 30 years ago already: then, the typical worker in a small-town low-coster there would highly likely understand your English well, and would be able to communicate you the answers you need. Now, even people with unfinished primary school will be able to understand English. Most universities there teach everything in English too, some teach in English only.)
You do not *have* to donate in order to use LibreOffice. They have no way to know if you use it but do not donate, or if you donate to it but do not use it, or if you do both, who of the many millions of LibreOffice users sent a specific donation. Thus, donating to them is safe for trans people, no matter the name they use for the donation, if they insist to donate. Nobody can connect a specific donation to a specific copy of LibreOffice. (Unlike MS Office / Word, LibreOffice copies are not tied to a license and thus do not have separate IDs. Neither do documents produced by them. They also do not collect and send any of your information or activities to anyone.)
This is part of the free software / open source philosophy. Take, for example, Google Chrome. It is developed by Google and tracks and sends to Google everything you do. However, it is also open source, so everyone can take its source code and modify it in any way they like. Consequently, nearly every Linux distribution has a "Chromium" browser that is Google Chrome stripped of all trackware, and privacy-safe to use.
In a Windows computer you will typically have tens of programs that collect and send to someone your personal info. (In addition to an unknown number of malware that does the same, among other things.) In a Linux computer, especially if the installed distribution is community-driven like eg. Debian, having even one such program would be scandalous. Programs that are made by the people who use them tend to not have bad things in them, and LibreOffice is such a program.
And more. When you install MS Windows / Word / any other commercial software without paying, this is theft. It is both illegal and ethically objective - you steal the work of the people who made it, and they will not be happy. When you install a free software, eg. LibreOffice, you become its user and possibly a contributor - eg. you might notice and report a bug. Or someone else might see and like LibreOffice thanks to you, also start using it and contributing to it. So not only it is perfectly legal, but is also highly ethical, since you are a potential helper - the people who make it will be happy that you too started using it. :)
Apologies for the long comment.
Saving
You should be able to do File, Save as on any other program. Try typing out a few words and saving the file. It should prompt you for a file name when you first save it.
The default format for LibreOffice Writer is ODF Text Document (.odt). You can select a Microsoft Office format if you need to, by selecting it from a drop-down menu where you see this displayed in the Save dialog box.
Not every detail available in Microsoft Word will be present in LibreOffice Writer, but everything you need to write a story like something you would post here is available.
Google Docs
For now, I am trying Google Docs as a test. So far, I have been able to do everything I want to do.
:)
Gwen Brown
Beware of Google
Beware of anything to do with Google. Google the search engine and Gmail (I presume Google docs as well) are data miners and happily share that data.
Hugs
Patricia
Happiness is being all dressed up and HAVING some place to go.
Semper in femineo gerunt
Ich bin ein femininer Mann
With Word and Windows, you
With Word and Windows, you have been saving your documents on your local computer (and possibly on Microsoft's cloud if you use the OneDrive? as well). LibreOffice on Windows will be the same.
With Google Docs your documents are normally saved on Google's cloud, though there may be ways to save a copy on a local hard disk if you ask it to. LibreOffice on a ChromeBook might be more like Google Docs.
Pros and cons with each.
With a local disk backups and hard disk failures are your problem, with the cloud they are Someone Else's Problem ...
With cloud, the cloud provider will read your data and use it for marketing and advertising ... You can probably trust them not to tell your partner anything, but ...
Not choices we want to make, but sadly ones whose consequences we need to be aware of and then actively choose.
Uhm ... stop, deep breath, relax, grab a cuppa ...
I've had no trouble with PortableApps,com & LibreOffice for a decade plus. Maybe more.
First, free means free.
No. Really. =Free=.
You will want to "start clean" though. Whatever you've done, and whatever you've gotten snarled up in ... Do these:
= If you have any work, you'll need to save it outside of your local Portable Apps (PA) directory. (The "PA" default save place is inside of the PA directory=folder structure, which is why we save outside of it.)
= Then it is safe to delete, or to rename your current PA directory
---
Next, go back to https://portableapps.com/, and download the menu system. This is offered on the PA home page, on the right below the "Set your PC free", some system logos, and then big green "Download Now - Free" button.
This will download the Menu system (picture to the left). This should be smooth and pretty much like every nice download you've ever done. Yes, you will likely see "Please donate". But it's "Please", not "You Must" donate.
Once you have the Menu system in place (will look like the picture, but empty), use the menu system itself to download the software you want.
On the right (grey for me) panel, click Apps, then Get More Apps, then By Category. This "Portable Apps Updater" may take 1-3 minutes. Then, scroll to what you want, click it, then click install. May take several minutes.
It's best to get =all= of LibreOffice, "Picking and Choosing components" doesn't save much disk space.
It's also best (Easiest!) to use the menu system to download and install. "By hand" installs are too much of a pain.
===
Every thing you install, has a right-click un-install on the menu system. If that does not work, first save any work "someplace else", and delete the problem folder/piece inside the PortableApps directory.
If you feel like the whole thing is a complete FUBAR hash ... It's safe to delete the whole PortableApps folder, and start over. But start over "tomorrow", when you are rested and unfrazzled
===
PS: PA talks about having PA and all you your goodies on a USB - but will live happily on your system (C:]) (hard) drive.
PPS: My system is Windows 10, and my Browser is (wait for it) the PortableApps "Iron" browser. I think its a variant of Chrome or Chromium ,,,
PPPS: My lifetime contributions to PA are uhm, blush ... zero.
Microsoft will stop supporting Windows 10 next month.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/products/windows...
Microsoft will stop supporting (Home, Pro, Pro Education, Pro for Workstations versions of) Windows 10 on 14 October 2025 - ie in six weeks time. It wont stop working, but if security problems are found they (probably) wont fix them.
I haven't checked, but I believe that no money is required to upgrade to Windows 11, but if you are considering LibreOffice, you could go all the way and consider one of the Linux distributions (such as Ubuntu or Fedora, - there are many others; I don't know which would be best for a beginner). Linux distributions are typically free (money) and do not have adverts or phone home with any of your details.
Win 11 is not an upgrade
when you consider the vastly increased level of snooping it has over W10. MS wants you to sign up with an MS account but there are ways to bypass it but they are not easy for non expert users. Almost all my friends have ditched Windows since W11 was released.
Sadly, I have had to buy a W11 machine in order to work with some of the apps that a charity that I'm a director of uses. It is just painful after years of MacOS and Linux.
Samantha
Win 11 *is* an upgrade
It is a forced upgrade of your hardware to match the entirely artificial constraints they put on customers who want to install Win 11.
That means that you have to discard new or almost new hardware you bought to run Win 10 - unless you can find out the tricks to make Win 11 load on what you already have.
If you have a reasonably new workstation which will not run Win 11 then load Linux on it. I personally use plain Debian, with the LXDE desktop, if you let the install program configure using the defaults it is probably less painful than installing Windows, and gives you a device that can do almost as much - and probably a lot faster!
There are many other choices out there, some of which will give you a setup that is barely distinguishable from what Microsoft sells (but probably works better). Many folk here will give advice if you go that route.
Oh, yes, Microsoft force you to have a "Account" so that they can keep an eye on you. And they default to storing everything in the "Cloud", on something called "Onedrive" which means on their servers, often in places which are hard to find when you want something later. You don't get any of that nonsense using Linux.
Penny
BTW, there are ways around
BTW, there are ways around the forced account. Several, in fact. As I have to do reinstalls reasonably often, I simply have an image that grants the ability to say "I don't have internet", and then get a local account. One of the biggest frustrations is that Microsoft does NOT recognize 365 accounts as being "Microsoft Accounts", which means that for a small business without an IT person like me around, they're forced to attach a personal microsoft account to their business machine, and that can wreak havoc with licensing.
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
I've been using MS Office 97 Pro ...
... for years. I have it on a CD I 'acquired' from somewhere so long ago I can't remember. It does all we want and far more and runs perfectly on Widows 11. I think copies are available on eBay and have the advantage that they not controlled by MS. I hate rented s/w. I also occasionally use Libre Office.
You have Wordpad in win10
You already have Wordpad in windows 10, it is often overlooked but works fine for most edits.
The last I saw, they had
The last I saw, they had extended the Office 'support' through October of 2026, same as with Microsoft Edge. Even then, it's not supposed to be disabled, just stop updating.
Just as an FYI, if you know someone with an old (like 2003 or 2007) Microsoft Office, it will install and run on Windows 10 and Windows 11. 2007 supports docx and xlsx natively, 2003 there's an update to support it.
I use Libreoffice on my laptop, and I've never had anyone say 'I can't read the spreadsheet you just sent to me.' (or "Word" document)
I just open Calc or Writer (spreadsheet and document program), and use it just like any program made since 1986 with a graphical interface. Microsoft has distorted everything, but LibreOffice mostly keeps to it.
The original OpenOffice is still around, and under the Apache foundation, if you'd prefer that. Oracle divested themselves of it after all the developers forked OO and created LibreOffice due to how Oracle abuses people. (BTW, a "MySQL" standard license is over $2,000 a year. )
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
LibreOffice
I did some tests to see if I could do what I wanted to do. Everything was fine. I just write and print and eventually again plan to post to BCTS. I don't do Games. Years ago I did MS Flight simulator but a few years ago all that stopped. I'm fine. :))))
Gwen Brown or what ever.
"Extended" support - a noun not a verb.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/5516071/...
suggests that you can pay for that extra year of support;
https://www.microsoft.com/en-US/windows/end-of-support
suggests that the extra year of support will cost you $30 or 1000 Microsoft Rewards points.
Mastering Libre Office
https://shop.linuxnewmedia.com/shop/category/special-issues-17
A print version is $17.99.
I bought one for a friend some years ago. It saved her a lot of grief.
Samantha