What laptop brands are best?

[Jackalope]

Get Libre Office. It's free and you can open/save in Microsoft Word format.

This, and as Moros said, when exchanging documents, use PDF.

[Autumnlicious]

Unfortunately PDF's aren't always an option. Many documents are collaborative efforts. That makes PDF’s unusable unless everyone has got Adobe Acrobat,

If you don't have a PDF reader, then something is drastically wrong here, considering that it is the de facto leader in forms-you-hate dept (IRS I am looking at you)...

and I don’t know anyone that’s not in the publishing business that uses that. Plus I've seen problems with formatting and tracking changes between Office and OpenOffice. I haven’t tried any of the other office suites though.

I've seen formatting issues between Microsoft Office versions.

That said, PDFCreator is your friend on producing pdfs on the fly. (It's a 'fake' printer driver that spits out PDF's).

DOC collaboration is an iffy model, less iffy than OpenOffice-Office collabs, but still uncertain.

The entire authors/publisher software market is a clusterfuck. I can't tell what I hate more -- Frame Maker or MS Word...

[popeyespappy]

What do you use to make a PDF editable?

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I can read and create PDF files. What I can't do is edit someone else's.

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DOC collaboration is an iffy model, less iffy than OpenOffice-Office collabs, but still uncertain.

Probably and probably is probably a poor choice of words for the kind of stuff I deal with which is sending contracts back and forth until ever body can agree on them or collected various inputs from different people and roll it all up into a single report.

[IATIA]

What do you use to make a PDF editable?

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I can read and create PDF files. What I can't do is edit someone else's.

In a lot of cases, if not most, a PDF is intended to be a record of sorts and not intended to be editable. If I send a PDF, I do not want you changing it and if I feel you have a need to change my document and I am OK with that, then I will just send you a 'Word' document.

[popeyespappy]

But if ya'll have a tool I'm not aware of I'd be happy to find out about it! You don't know how many times I've had to tell some fricken sub that I'm not going to accept their deliverable in PDF because I'm not going to type the damn thing over again before the customer gets a copy.

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What do you use to make a PDF editable?

---

I can read and create PDF files. What I can't do is edit someone else's.

In a lot of cases, if not most, a PDF is intended to be a record of sorts and not intended to be editable. If I send a PDF, I do not want you changing it and if I feel you have a need to change my document and I am OK with that, then I will just send you a 'Word' document.

That's my take on it which is why I mentioned collaborative efforts.

[SkepticalMoron]

HP or Mac

[Jaysyn]

Seriously, after all the labs I did in University for physics, I've come to the conclusion that anyone obsessed over needing MS Office is a dumbshit.

Painting with an awful broad brush there, aren't we?

I'd rather use free software, but I have a few spreadsheets here at work that still, to this day, make OpenOffice & LibreOffice puke their guts out.

[Tiberius]

For those who want easily editable PDFs, learn LaTeX.

[IATIA]

If one is adamant to remain in a Windoze environment, gaming tests the resources of any machine and I would expect that a machine that could excel in gaming could do anything else with ease.

Alienware

[Autumnlicious]

Seriously, after all the labs I did in University for physics, I've come to the conclusion that anyone obsessed over needing MS Office is a dumbshit.

Painting with an awful broad brush there, aren't we?

I'd rather use free software, but I have a few spreadsheets here at work that still, to this day, make OpenOffice & LibreOffice puke their guts out.

A) Legacy is just that. Legacy. You forced it to be vendor specific, not agnostic. All bets are off.

B) Office compatibility is going to break, sooner or later. Cruft cannot be maintained indefinitely.

C) If you're writing complex programs in Office, you've already fucked up as you've transcended the scope of minor formulas (to which Office, Open Office, LibreOffice excel at) to actual programs (to which R, Python, Ruby excel at).

Yeah, I feel I can generalize it given that the majority of Office uses are forming new docs, using spreadsheets with simple numerical analysis, etc,.