>Side note how's open office compatibility these days? Last time I tried it yeeears ago there were still compatibility problems that would have made group projects hard.
While Open Office still exists (and is being actively supported), LibreOffice (forked from OpenOffice fifteen years ago) gets more frequent updates, is more broadly used, and is widely preferred over OpenOffice these days.
I use it and it's a nice replacement for the Microsoft Office suite. In fact, I have Microsoft Office and prefer LibreOffice over it.
I suggest giving LibreOffice[0] a look. Many of the compatibility issues have been resolved and it works nicely.