1391. Microsoft Office Documents - Options.

Don asked: I need to work with Microsoft Office documents, but I'm self-employed and can't afford to purchase a copy of Microsoft Office. Do I have other options?

A few years ago there might not of been many options but nowadays there are several different things you can try. 

First of all Microsoft itself publishes Office 365 and provides an online very inexpensive web-based solution for editing Word. Excel, and PowerPoint documents. 

Another option is looking one of the open source applications that allows you to edit Microsoft Office documents. There are two that I know of. One called LibreOffice.com and one called OpenOffice.com. Both of them are very popular, a lot of people use them, and they're both free to download and use on your computer.

They both work on Windows and Mac machines as does the web-based version of Office 365.  Office 365 isn't free but it is directly from Microsoft. 

Check these out and see which one of them will work best for you. 

In addition to the web-based Microsoft offerings if you paid them a little bit more per month you can also get downloadable copies of the application that will run on your local computer. You need to pay a monthly fee to use them but if you're job is short lived you can always use them just for the month you need them and then cancel your subscription.