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.

I used OpenOffice many years ago until I lost an entire paper.

Yep. I prefer to avoid any potential issues. Losing a paper would blow hardcore. I know we have had people here on the forum complain about compatibility problems with documents exported from other applications to Word format too.

Considering that Office 365 is free (or can be for enrolled students, and less than $10/mo for anyone else) there is no reason not to use it, IMO.