On 17/09/2020 21.10, VanguardLH wrote:
"Carlos E.R." wrote:

The worst of this is that my friend "needs Word" for working at home
because of the pandemic, thus her employer should be providing any
software needed at their expense, but apparently they will not :-/

You sure MS Word is a mandate dictated by her employer? Maybe she just
thinks it is a mandate from her employer? More likely they just want
her to work on Word documents.

No, the employer, AFAIK, doesn't mandate anything. They just say "now
you have to work from home. Arreglatelas"

The last word I don't know how to translate. It is like get it done in
any manner you can, at your cost. We will not provide anything. So they
have to buy the laptops, the internet connection, the software...

The choice of "Word" comes from everybody else using Word, both other
teachers and the parents.

To me, with the employer not paying anything, they should be using
Linux. Or tablets with Android (students often do that, use tablets).
Anything with zero cost.

At least (being the education administration) they could have some kind
of rebate plan, but apparently they don't. If you are curious, they
contracted gmail for group or enterprises, thus google documents is
certainly an enticing idea.

Not sure how her employer would know she was not using MS Word at home
if the alternative word processors could read and save in .doc[x]
format. Her employer would just be getting a file as the result of her
home-based work. Although possible, it is unlikely her employer's
documents (if not using VBA for scripting) use features available in MS
Word that are not available in the alternatives. If Wordpad, as
suggested by others, is a viable candidate for an alternative word
processor to MS Word, the scripting and esoteric features in MS Word are
non-issues to selecting alternatives to MS Word.

As far as I know, the documents are just home work for the students, not
provided or sent to the employer. And as far as I know, they are sent as
PDF. But, when working together with other teachers, they share the
..docx files. I have never seen anything sophisticated in those
documents. Just formatted text, bold, underline, paragraphs... very
simple stuff. Ah, and links. I think WordPad could do.



Do any of these documents she is supposed to work on incorporate VBA
macros (i.e., dynamic documents)?

Nay. No, no way. :-)

....

I'd say, if she has a decent always-on Internet connection, to have your
friend try the free online Office web apps to see if they are sufficient
for her use.

I did suggest that.

If so, and if offline access is needed, then consider
offline alternatives, like Softmaker's FreeOffice or LibreOffice, but
she'll still have some learning to adapt to the alternatives. Just
showing a ribbon bar similar to MS Word doesn't compensate for all the
differences between different programs.



--
Cheers, Carlos.