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Open Office
Thinking about it - 1/4/08 at 04:29 PM

Anyone using open office instead of Microsoft office? Any comments?
My daughter is getting a new laptop tomorrow and just wondering which way to go.

Thanks in advance.

locogeoff - 1/4/08 at 04:38 PM

Personally I think it's great, or it was a while ago and from what I have read it only gets better.

OTOH my sister has had a number of problems working on a long document between work (MS Office) and home (Open Office) which ended up with me installing an old version of MS Office at home which worked better than the Open Office at opening the document.

I beleive you can get MS Office home and student version for 3 PCs for about £100. However that is £100 pounds more than open office costs.

Griffo - 1/4/08 at 05:14 PM

I use open office, its not too bad depends how much you want to do on it. Ive never had any real problems just one or two things on Excel aren't quite the same on open office. nothing much. I would go for open office first. If you need to you can always get MS office at a later date.

Pdlewis - 1/4/08 at 05:16 PM

I use both side by side so have MS on my main work PC then run open Office on all the virtual machines I use I have only used OO for opening and viewing files but never had any issues with the rendering or calcuations and would recomend it for anyone who doesnt want to falk out for MS Office (although given the choice money no object id always have MS)

BenB - 1/4/08 at 05:25 PM

I like it. It seems to like a relatively healthy amount of RAM compared to Word- then again I upgraded to 2Gb a while back so possibly the latest versions are less memory dependant (not suprisingly since going to 2Gb there haven't been any problems due to a lack of memory!!).

If you're doing normal word processing / spreadsheet type stuff then it works fine. Occasionally I get a glitch with fancy stuff so I've got Office 2003 on the system as well for those files...

If she's going to be sending files to other people it's worth setting it up so it defaults to saving in Word document format...

jlparsons - 1/4/08 at 06:22 PM

I use open office, I find it far better than microsoft. It can be set to save files in microsoft format automatically, and can also save in pdf format for distribution.

Paradoxia0 - 1/4/08 at 07:22 PM

My personal experience - bag of c**p... Wouldn't touch it with a barge pole and have banned it from any work PC.

But then on the other hand as a free package to use at home for day to day stuff does the job perfectly well.

David Jenkins - 1/4/08 at 07:22 PM

I also use OO at home, both on Linux and Windoze 2000. It has pretty much the same functionality as MS Office, although the actual controls/actions vary a bit. I have to use MS Office at work, and have little trouble converting between the two.

Just one warning - the very latest MS Office is starting to use new file extensions, undoubtedly to mess up software like OO. For example, a Word file now has the extension 'docx', and an Excel file is 'xlsx' (or something like that). I'm not sure how OO is geared up for these new extensions (it may well work).

However, that's another reason for abandoning MS products, as far as I'm concerned.

The main benefit for me is that I have several desktop and laptop computers, and I can legally put a copy of OO on every one of them, entirely for free.

Jubal - 1/4/08 at 07:35 PM

quote:
Originally posted by locogeoff
OTOH my sister has had a number of problems working on a long document between work (MS Office) and home (Open Office) which ended up with me installing an old version of MS Office at home which worked better than the Open Office at opening the document.


This is almost the only reason not to use it. If you need to edit the same document in both Office and OO then don't bother. Mail merge is also pants in OO and the presentation package is a waste of space. That aside it's fine, I especially like the pdf export which is much higher quality than MS's efforts in Office 2007.

britishtrident - 1/4/08 at 08:12 PM

quote:
Originally posted by Jubal
quote:
Originally posted by locogeoff
OTOH my sister has had a number of problems working on a long document between work (MS Office) and home (Open Office) which ended up with me installing an old version of MS Office at home which worked better than the Open Office at opening the document.


This is almost the only reason not to use it. If you need to edit the same document in both Office and OO then don't bother. Mail merge is also pants in OO and the presentation package is a waste of space. That aside it's fine, I especially like the pdf export which is much higher quality than MS's efforts in Office 2007.



Anybody working with MS Word should set the defaults to save as Word97 format as the this is the most compatible -- the changing MS Word format over the years cause massive problems even among MS Office users.

Same goes for Open Office set the default save formats to Office97.

Only real fault with Open Office is that it is slow to start up on older hardware.

For anybody with older hardware or less memory Abiword is a good free word processor that will open & save Word documents

[Edited on 1/4/08 by britishtrident]

jlparsons - 1/4/08 at 09:06 PM

I reinstalled the hard drive on my desktop the other day with dual-boot windows/ubuntu linux. Windows took ages to install as after it had finished I had to download a bunch of drivers to get my wireless, sound and printer working. I then had to download open office, firefox, thunderbird, gimp, avast etc to install them. Ubuntu on the other hand worked instantly, recognised every device and install all the required software as part of the installation. It also seems faster and slicker, looks nicer and takes up less disk space.

So after getting agreement from SWMBO I'm not just getting rid of MS office but MS entirely.