Putting It All Together—Suggestions/Tips

[Merlin]

... Speaking of office 365, if you don't have it already, and you're enrolled as a student somewhere, you can get Office 365 for free through most schools. Though it's pretty cheap even without that, particularly if you're sharing it with a family and spreading the costs. Either way, you'll want Word and Excel at least, those are quite handy with all the projects and academic writing needed in the UL courses.

I was quite successful using LibreOffice for all of my schoolwork. I will note that I didn't have to deal with group projects, just had to export PDFs or MS Office files to turn in.

I also use Google docs to get a lot of that kind of stuff done. But IMO MS Office works better and is less likely to cause potential compatibility issues.