Did you know Excel is free?

[Franklin]

Did you know that Microsoft offers Excel for free in a web version?  Here is the link   https://skydrive.live.com   Signup for a free Microsoft Live account and it's yours.

Why use Excel?  I believe Excel to be one of the most bad ass apps ever written.  If you believe that "the truth is in the numbers", Excel will always prove it out.  Here are some examples of the things I track in Excel:  1.  Mortgage Amortization:  I used  Excel to pay off my house in seven years.  By the fourth year I predicted the final payment within a month.  2.  Retirement Age - I collated every bit of financial fact about myself, including sending the kids to college, taxes, SS, expense trends, inflation, average rate of return on investments.  You name it.  Currently it tells me I can retire at 55, but as the years go by I will enter live numbers and hopefully watch that number come down.  3. Investment Diversity - Every year I plug in my investment amounts, types, and industries and it shows me my diversity percentages, which I compare to my targets.  4. Cash Crunch - This is for when I am sweating the next 60 days in cash so I plug in my paydays and expenses based on date and it tells me if and when things will get tight.

Just a few examples but there are more.  If you haven't learned the very basics of Excel you are missing a vital Mustachian weapon.  It's simple arithmetic but a little bit of fun as well.

[ender]

As an advanced Excel user, yes, it is one of the most bad ass apps ever written.

[grantmeaname]

Any time I try to do real work in skydrive it makes me deeply sad. It's better than google docs, but still a long cry from power-user territory.

Libreoffice, though? That's where it's at.

[FunkyStickman]

If you don't trust Microsoft (like me) you can also download a completely legal and free copy of LibreOffice, which has almost exactly the same functionality as Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc. I will never buy Microsoft products ever again.

https://www.libreoffice.org/

[SavingMon(k)ey]

I have an aversion to Microsoft, not really rational, just don't like big corporations and try to support other things if I can. So I've been using the completely free OpenOffice and it's been great! I have it on my home and work computers. No problems so far. I built a whole YNAB style spreadsheet (currently in test mode) in it and it's working well.

[Jamesqf]

Any time I try to do real work in skydrive it makes me deeply sad. It's better than google docs...

To quote Terry Pratchett: "But Fred, so's yeast."

[grantmeaname]

I have an aversion to Microsoft, not really rational, just don't like big corporations and try to support other things if I can. So I've been using the completely free OpenOffice and it's been great!

FWIW, OpenOffice is basically an Oracle product. LibreOffice is supported by its own foundation, not a big company, and it's coded by a bunch of linux guys who got beardrage when Oracle bought Sun and forked it to their own project. It's a little more up-to-date and a little less buggy, because serious development of OOO ended in 2010.

[Crash87]

How does libreoffice compare to OpenOffice? OpenOffice has pretty solid word and excel, but I find its PowerPoint lacking.

[grantmeaname]

OpenOffice as you use it today is what LibreOffice looked like in 2010. The differences won't be as stark as Microsoft Office in 2010 vs 2013 (there's no ribbon interface, for example), but there's a lot more spit and polish for LO Writer/Calc, and Impress is finally at the level of usability. It's not great, but it's good enough.

One thing that I find helps is saving my presentations as PDF files. Then they don't open looking like shit, which they're almost guaranteed to if they're saved as PPT or ODPs and you open them on a computer with a different office suite.

[arebelspy]

Another vote here for LibreOffice being the way to go.  It forked from OO and became much better.

I use MS Office because I already have it, but if I didn't, I'd be using LibreOffice.  100x better than any "online" offering.

[Jamesqf]

One thing that I find helps is saving my presentations as PDF files. Then they don't open looking like shit, which they're almost guaranteed to if they're saved as PPT or ODPs and you open them on a computer with a different office suite.

Second that.  Especially as I do the few presentations I have to make with the LaTeX Beamer class.  So much easier than OOO.

[SavingMon(k)ey]

I have an aversion to Microsoft, not really rational, just don't like big corporations and try to support other things if I can. So I've been using the completely free OpenOffice and it's been great!

FWIW, OpenOffice is basically an Oracle product. LibreOffice is supported by its own foundation, not a big company, and it's coded by a bunch of linux guys who got beardrage when Oracle bought Sun and forked it to their own project. It's a little more up-to-date and a little less buggy, because serious development of OOO ended in 2010.

Thanks for that pointer. I will check out LibreOffice. Does it open MS Office and OpenOffice files easily?

[Daley]

I have an aversion to Microsoft, not really rational, just don't like big corporations and try to support other things if I can. So I've been using the completely free OpenOffice and it's been great!

FWIW, OpenOffice is basically an Oracle product. LibreOffice is supported by its own foundation, not a big company, and it's coded by a bunch of linux guys who got beardrage when Oracle bought Sun and forked it to their own project. It's a little more up-to-date and a little less buggy, because serious development of OOO ended in 2010.

Actually, since the release of OpenOffice over to the Apache Foundation, development's back on and progressing at a surprising pace again. (So yes, OOo is technically dead, but AOO is alive and flourishing in its place.) It appears they may have merged back some of the LO code with their major 4.0 release last month, but more importantly they're starting to branch off into their own development direction with the user interface pulling some from IBM's Lotus Symphony's features (and lightly from more current MS Office UI changes).

The F/OSS office suite options are starting to open back up again with some genuine diversity.

[grantmeaname]

I have an aversion to Microsoft, not really rational, just don't like big corporations and try to support other things if I can. So I've been using the completely free OpenOffice and it's been great!

FWIW, OpenOffice is basically an Oracle product. LibreOffice is supported by its own foundation, not a big company, and it's coded by a bunch of linux guys who got beardrage when Oracle bought Sun and forked it to their own project. It's a little more up-to-date and a little less buggy, because serious development of OOO ended in 2010.

Thanks for that pointer. I will check out LibreOffice. Does it open MS Office and OpenOffice files easily?

It does OO formats natively and Microsoft better than OOO did but only somewhat well.

[Paul der Krake]

One thing that I find helps is saving my presentations as PDF files. Then they don't open looking like shit, which they're almost guaranteed to if they're saved as PPT or ODPs and you open them on a computer with a different office suite.

Second that.  Especially as I do the few presentations I have to make with the LaTeX Beamer class.  So much easier than OOO.

Ditto. Presentations should be about content and getting your point across, not fancy delivery consisting of image transitions moving around the screen. Additionally, working with text files only brings you all the usual programmer goodies like version control and text utilities like sed.

Latex FTW.

[Jamesqf]

Ditto. Presentations should be about content and getting your point across, not fancy delivery consisting of image transitions moving around the screen.

Though (per the docs, as I don't use them myself) Beamer can do a bunch of those fancy transitions, and other fancy delivery stuff.  Just as LaTeX itself can do pretty much anything Word/OO/LO can do (and possibly a number that they can't).  It just lets me do it in a way that's much easier for me to work with.