Best Microsoft Office

Well, Microsoft are becoming Samsung with the vast array of product variants nowadays.

This includes the various office versions out there

2010 Starter

365 Home Premium

Professional 2013

Home and Student 2013

Home and Business 2013

Office 2003 / 2007 / 2011 (various versions)

There are OEM / Retail offerings as well as Single / Multi PC licences

For anyone wishing to buy the basic yet full featured version that is quick and not bloated.

Which versions should the average Jo be using, non of this business nonsense?

OpenOffice unless you have a specific business reason to need MS Office.

Kingsoft Office or LibreOffice

Looks like you missed Office XP Professional off your list.

I have upgraded MS Office Pro over the years and stopped at 2010 as it allows me multiple installs/reinstalls without hassle, later licenses are very restrictive. It looks like MS Office 2010 Pro is silly pricey these days though

My need is business use and I have to share and develop things with others so need to have comparable MS Office to my clients. When I set up other peoples machines for non-professional use I have used OpenOffice

some more info/choices here:

http://www.techsupportalert.com/best-free-office-suite.htm

Anything before the ribbon, after the ribbon go open office.

Personally I like 2007 version.

When I first read this I thought it was a poll! Also missing, Microsoft Office 95, 97 and all the Mac variants!

I remember Office 95 Pro with affection - my biggest foray into Excel was using Office 95 Pro and the wonderful discovery of 'concatanation'. Mad a spreadsheet with workbooks that moved data around, recorded staff absence and other stuff.

Regarding the Ribbon - people are igonoring QAT (Quick Access Toolbar) - I use QAT 99% of the time - you can customise it to included all those Office 2003 shortcuts missing from the Ribbon - some of which don't work in 2007 which feels like 2007 was basically 2003 with bolt-ons - that's why it is not as good as 2010 (Did I just say that?). The best all-time was 2003 - but this is no lonnger supported. Where I work 2010 is downloadable for nothing so I guess it will be being phased out soon.

Alternatives - Kingsoft Office (also available for GNU/Linux now! - the only downside to it is that it is not compatible with GNU/Linux screenreader). LibreOffice far outstrips OpenOffice as the former has most of the Devs that worked on OpenOffice and has more add-ins than OpenOffice (capability of viewing Visio files).

Tried Kingsoft Office but did not get on with it as some of its options are paid for.

I have been using the latest OpenOffice for a while and love it's 2003 interface but some options are a but confusing.

Never tried LibreOffice, is that better than OpenOffice and is it easy to use?

LibreOffice is the original OpenOffice group - they split off after... Oracle? bought the rights to OpenOffice and became more and more demanding only to then declare they would stop development.

OpenOffice is no longer in development - the up-to-date version is LibreOffice, so give that a go, you might like it.

Yes just looking at Libra and it looks almost identical but cleaner and more modern so if Open is older and has no support then why can you still receive updates in Open, I may switch to Libra now knowing this as it does not seem to be that different and may be more future reliable.