Office apps

I have years and years of MS Office Word and Excel docs. Many contain complex formatting, tables and tabs and bullets and fonts and images and tricky quirks and formulas galore. (Though not so many macros, I admit.) PowerPoint is useless to me. Access is too gutless and arbitrarily-Microsoft-limited for me.

Any thoughts or opinions about Microsoft Office (95 through 2013) vs Apache OpenOffice vs LibreOffice. Specifically, which might be best for preserving (and editing) my mountains of old Word/Excel docs with minimum feature loss or manual rework?

Just thought I'd ask around before trying them each out and ending up with a bunch of mismatched document formats, lol, my experience with OpenOffice (almost 10 years ago) taught me that file import and export and conversion does not always preserve 100% of the complexities and quirks found in the original, and sometimes just throwing off a single point or pixel is enough to destroy the entire layout across many pages.

If you want to keep your Office docs looking the way they are with no issues, then keep Office. In my experience with Open Office and Libre office, the import/export functions still are not 100%. Even my simple docs have to have the formatting fixed. I finally just gave up because I didn't want to keep spending the time to make them perfect.

I was kinda hoping to avoid dependency on MSOffice.

I've bought too many copies already, I want to avoid the trap of buying more copies of Microsoft Office (and/or Microsoft Windows) every time they "improve" it, Microsoft has sucked more money from me over the years than I feel comfortable admitting.

And I don't want to pollute or bloat my linux machinery, lol, but alas my WINE doesn't seem to like MSO2013.

To be honest I spent 10 years trying to find an alternative and kept getting swept back into MSOffice because of document issues. Once I started writing tech pubs and instruction manuals I had to move to MSOffice full time because I was spending too much time fixing my OpenOffice docs. Granted it has gotten WAY better, but they are just not 100% yet.

I actually stopped buying more copies of MSoffice and instead signed up for Office 365. For $99/year I can install the full office suite (minus access on 5 different computers in addition to any cell phone I (or the wife) has. Plus I get 1tb of space on OneDrive for whatever I need (I am pretty sure that is 1tb for each of the 5 installs). Those installs can be given to anyone, not just used in your immediate family. I gave one install to my nephew in another state.

Damn. I sound like an office 365 sales person...

One last note: You can use the online office apps on any computer or OS. All you need is a browser.

If you want to stay away from MSOffice, I have heard Google Docs is good, but I refuse to use any of their data collection software or devices.

MSO might be the "best" way for me to go, then.

To be fair, Microsoft and Google (and Apple, and Sony, and pretty much every big corp making tech these days) are equally guilty of installing spyware/telemetrics, invading personal privacy, and making more money by selling the collected info to advertisers/etc. Which is to say that while Google has a dark side, Microsoft ain't (in my opinion) any better, and this isn't enough on it's own for me to dismiss the Google product. I checked it out a little, though, and it sucks - failed to import any of my hand-picked "most challenging" docs, so it's of no use to me.