Re: functionality
Around here, the school will usually provide a 'free' Office Education account. They are good for four years; they used to be renewable, now not so much, but it's trivial to just get a new one instead... if you still have anything to do with an educational institution. At the place I do adjunct instruction for, the Office account can be installed on four devices without complaining. Guess how I know.
In addition, the school puts a copy on every school computer, including the ones they lend to students. All students (and staff and faculty, even peons like adjuncts) get Official School Accounts. I have an Official School Laptop, which has the Official School Account installed. I have access to multiple school desktops, all of which can have the Official School Account, all I have to do is log in with my school ID. I also have the other account, installed on my home desktops (one Mac, one Win10) my laptop (Win10) and my iPad Pro. And I have the office account as well. I have, for example, four OneDrive accounts, three 'business' and one 'personal'. The 'business' accounts are the school account, the office account, and a school account for a place I no longer work at, it's been a year and they haven't turned it off yet, the installer for Office still works, too; the 'personal' account is my Office Education account. Apparently you can have unlimited 'business' accounts but just one 'personal' account, I had OneDrives available from other places, including OneDrives which shipped with the desktop and laptop, but turned them off as There Can Only Be One.
In any case, unless the school is taking the piss, your daughter should not have to pay a penny.
Meanwhile, it is correct that many formatting settings in LibreOffice and _especially_ in OpenOffice have problems with MS Office. Every now and again I install either or both and test them; they still manage to mangle certain DOC, DOCX, and most especially PPTX documents, and they do it in predictable ways and have been doing it since at least the days of Office 2010. I have reported the problem to both LibreOffice and Microsoft; in both cases, the report sank without a trace. (LibreOffice is at https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/enter_bug.cgi?format=guided; it's incredibly difficult and annoying to report bugs to MS... and then the daft buggers just ignore you. Why, it's almost as if they don't give a fuck.)
I have no idea who causes the problem, MS or LO/OO. I just note that there were problems moving from Office 2004 (Mac) and Office 2008 (Mac) to Office 2010 (Windows), problems mostly fixed with Office 2011 (Mac), and a good thing too, as there was no Mac version of Office 2013 and the next Mac version was 2016. I know that if you have complex documents, including tables, tables of content, tables of authority, indexes, and multiple images (such as, oh, a 175 page annual report, and yes, there's a reason why I pick that particular example), LO/OO barf all over.It's not that particular original document, subsequent documents also caused barfage. As I said, it's quite predictable. Note that Google Docs and Apple iWorks do NOT have this problem; indeed, a way to get Office 2004 or 2008 files to work properly in Office 2010 was to run them past iWorks first, just open them and save them in DOCX or PPTX or XLSX. Problem goes away.No, I can't explain it.
Note that I have a _lot_ of iWorks documents... and both MS Office and LO/OO can't handle them properly, if at all. But iWorks can read MS Office and LO/OO documents...
Frankly, I am about to stop even trying with LO/OO, it's been over a decade and the problem persists. I'll just be using MS Office, or iWorks, and have done.