Free Office Software Suggestions...

The controls you see on the side of the Writer are called the Sidebar by OpenOffice. The default is for the Properties option of the Sidebar to open on startup but if you click the x at the top of that window, it will close and the sidebar will be reduced to only taking up a single icon width on the side of your screen. If you now exit Writer and come back in, the Properties option will remain closed until you click on it's icon. If you prefer, you can view/hide the Sidebar from the View menu, just remove the checkmark to hide it, check it again to see it.

I have an older (6 years old) Acer Aspire One netbook with an N270 Atom processor running at 1.6Ghz and maxed out with 1.5GB of RAM and upgraded with an ssd. It runs Win 8.1.1 better than it ran XP that it came with.

LibreOffice looks like it just might be the cat's meow! By the way, just thought I'd share that said netbook has been "upgraded" to Win8Pro and an SSD. It scoots along nicely for only having 2G of RAM. Getting the metro apps to work in that low resolution was a bit of a challenge, but it's working well now.

Click For Full-Size Image.

I also use LibreOffice primarily. To get an idea of how LibreOffice Write would look on your Netbook's screen resolution of 1024x600, click on the image.





Click For Full-Size Image.

This is what Kingsoft Write would look like. Though free, its not open source, so may display ad links when you first open the app. Again, click to see what it would look like on your Netbook screen.

I use Kingsoft Office Android version in my tablet.

Take a look at Kingsoft - it's basically a clone of MS Office, but using the "old" interface. And it's free. How Microsoft lets it live is beyond me, but it's a dandy bunch of software.

al

I just changed from Open Office to Libre Office.

I also use LIBRAOFFICE for WINDOWS but mainly for the drawing aspect of it... Works great as an alternative to AUTOCAD... Never played with the word processing part of it...

I'm hoping it will work well with WIN 7 since I will be changing over from WIN XP to this sometime soon...

Roy Ken

LibreOffice...tool bar along the top.
Free and open source.