I have to be honest here. I was playing around with Linux on my four year old Dell XP machine. I think and still do think it has great possibilities. But for the novice to try to get a dual operating system up and running is not exactly chopped liver. I started to think about everything and just bought a new “refurbished” Dell Vista machine for $400 from Dell and for all the bad press that Vista has received I think it is a bad rap. I think the new operating system on a properly configured machine up and running out of the box is the way to go.
I couldn’t possibly have purchased even the parts for this never mind the Vista system which retails for $250 by itself. I do need to get the Home version of Office 2007 with Word and Excel for about $120 over the internet. Vista is is already on this machine including a big hard drive, dual core processor, and 2 gb memory and all the bells and whistles and is lightning fast. Two days and UPS is at my door.
I’ll just keep the old machine which worked fine as a backup but I’m loving my new machine and Vista. Definetly better than XP. Don’t even need a manual. I doubt if I will bother with Linux. Just not worth my time. My $0.03 for today.
I don’t know if this would meet all your needs, but a “lightweight” version of OpenOffice Writer (word processor) and Calc (spreadsheet) are available on the basic PortableApps download.
As a test, I just created a small document, saved it in “Word 97/XP” format and opened it with Word 2003. It came out formatted correctly. Seems to work OK.
The developers request a donation, but tryouts are free.