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Comment by danielford | Hacker News Reader

PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote are more important to my job (I teach) than any other program. But none of those features will improve my work, and the impending subscription service makes me want to look at other options.

I'd be interested in seeing recommendations for alternatives.

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You don't have to subscribe. Office 2013 will be available standalone:

"Is Office 365 required to run Office 2013?

No. You will still be able to purchase any Office 2013 edition with a perpetual license that doesn’t require any ongoing subscription fees. This version can be combined with a free Microsoft Account (aka Windows Live account) to allow online document storage and sharing."

http://www.zdnet.com/office-2013-editions-at-a-glance-and-fa...

I'm not sure about OneNote, but you can go a long way (even export PowerPoint and Excel files) with both LibreOffice (which is free for you and your students, forever) and with Apple's iWork, which is very expensive, but comes free with a beautiful computer. If you already own a computer beautiful enough, it's quite cheap.

Note: actually, iWork doesn't come with every new Mac, but I felt the joke irresistible.

A mix of google docs and libre office sounds appropriate. They can interopt on a lot of data formats, so you can keep your powerpoints available anywhere via google docs (and do rapid fire editing with the web interface) and download and edit them locally. Google drive streamlines that all even more, and it would take a lot of tables to fill up the free gigabytes Google gives.

Don't upgrade.

Not an option. Moving my teaching materials to other programs would be a mountain of work at this point, but in five years it will be exponentially worse.

PowerPoint is the main issue. I've made a lot of animations for my courses that I'll have to remake from scratch if I switch programs.

If you accept that you will be switching at some point in the future, the sooner you start migrating to an open optionlike LibreOffice, the better. It feels good to know that nobody is going to pull the rug from under your feet.

(that said, I don't love LibreOffice and I don't know of any truly solid presentation solutions that are open, cheap, multiplatform and reasonably future-proof. I'm a coder so I've ended up in HTML5 + Sublime Text for my slides, but tooling for this option is rather limited)

LaTeX Beamer is very good for presentations.

For new stuff, prezi is an awesome platform for teaching presentations: http://prezi.com/2hk390sfkqjh/the-astronomy-masterclass/

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