I went through most of undergrad using OpenOffice. Do you think it's possible to use OpenOffice or LibreOffice in law school without having much trouble?

MS Office is expensive.

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OOo added support for docx files (I think, lol). And OneNote is nice, but I forget if that is included in the student version of MSO. MSO for students or whatever is not a full suite, which I don't like.

I'm just wondering if law professors do anything crazy with their documents that might give me trouble if I were to use OOo. For example, I've noticed some compatibility issues when people are tracking changes and add comments and such on a document.

Docx compatibility is very easy to work around.

Say what you want about Microsoft, their Office Suite is outstanding (if a little overpriced without a student/business discount). If you just need to type words, any old wp will do. If you need to do any sort of cross-referencing-Word hands-down. And if you're a Mac user, don't even think about Pages. Doesn't compare.

OneNote is def the best way to take notes and it is included in student edition. Check your school's bookstore to see if they offer MS Office for cheap or free. At Duke it's free and if you want to keep it past your student days you just pay $10 for a disc.

I think MSO is great, and that it's far better than OOo. But once you factor in the cost... not so much. I know the student version is cheap (last I checked, it was $70 w/ student promotion) but it lacks things like Outlook and Access (I don't think I'd need those in law school, but Access is useful for other things). It's a HUUUUGGEEE plus to have OneNote though (I've wanted to use it for a long, long time but never wanted to cough up the money for it).

I guess I'll just suck it up and buy the MSO student suite; OneNote is nice, and I'd definitely like to use some features that I know for sure would be compatible with whatever the professors are using.

I would like to echo some of the suggestions listed in previous posts.

One Note is a really nice to use. The user can share data easily between all these MS Office applications. With Student discount, the cost of the whole package is palatable.