I read an 'Ask Jack' in the Guardian which explained why for various reasons Libre Office is now better than Open Office, including support for newer document formats and features.
Our high school has just let the kids have 365. We've got a few versions at home through my work (2010& 2013) but ran out of licenses for my son's new gaming computer. He went and found a 'hookey'version of Office 2013
As far as I know the cheapest version is still the corporate tie in. Lots of large organisations (the NHS is an example) have a corporate license with Microsoft. It usually comes with a clause that allows employees to get a license and CD for just the price of postage. It's how I got my copy.
My experience too.Libre Office is complete toilet, in my experience. Slow to open, prone to crashing, and not fully compatible with MS Office, despite their claims.
My experience too.
I bought a Microsoft Works CD on ebay for a tenner, that opens MS Office files but I only get sent very basic stuff so I don't know how it would handle more complicated formatting.
If you work for a large organisation that uses Office, persuade them to talk to MS, who are quite happy to dole out very cheap licences. I think we've paid about a tenner for each of three installations of MS Office Pro over the years.