Alternative to Microsoft Office 2000 Premium

UbahOne

Any ideas guys?

Is Open Office as good as MS Office 2000 Premium?

Im on Windows XP.

sceptre

It's a good substitute

... which isn't to say it's "as good" to be honest

If all you really need is a word processor and spreadsheet then realistically it is just as good. A few diffferences in interface obviously but pointless spending any cash at all on Word and Excel for the sheer sake of it imho. The presentation software is quite good but has a few inconsistencies with powerpoint (it can't open all documents, though it will do the vast majority)

If you need Access then you need Office to be honest. if you don't need Access and you don't create or edit a whole load of presentation documents, at least give it a whirl. It's a big download but it is free.

UbahOne

Thanks a lot. I have Office 2000 Premium, I was just curious to see if its any good.

sceptre

I meant to add above that openoffice suffers a lot less from the slow buggy bloatware code of MS Office and will be happier on slightly slower machines. There's little consideration to adding sparkly text and listing it as a feature for example.

The differences in the word processor (just taking it as an example) are more aesthetic than functional - openoffice just looks a little different. No more different than the differences between Word and Lotus WordPro or Wordperfect. The one definite thing openoffice has going for it is that it can guarantee 100% total complete compatibility and identical interfaces on different operating systems

If you have Office 2000 Premium I'd certainly keep it (I know I kept mine)

Tom Dunne

I'd agree with sceptre.

I use Open Office at home and Office 2000 at work. Open Office is fine if you want to relatively straight forward things, but I'm writing a dissertation and I'm finding Open Office simply doesn't do what I want. I have to revert back to MS Office to do the avanced formatting and layout.

Also, as sceptre said, you do get 100% compatability - I am using Open Office on Windows 98,XP and Linux and have no trouble swapping files. Having said that, I also have had no trouble exporting from Open Office to Word and vise versa.

UbahOne

Cool...so Office 2000 Premium is best overall and Open Office is great for the simple str8forward stuff and compatible with linux. Good stuff.

sci0x

Another good substitute to MS Office is Corl WordPerfect Office 11. It offers one key feature that Word currently doesn't: Reveal Codes, which allows you to view and make changes to a document's formatting. This function enhances with the ability to print formatting codes, which allows multiple users to collaborate on documents more easily.

WordPerfect Office 11 also makes files universally accessible, no matter which office suite created them. The new WordPerfect Office Conversion Utility,, for example, lets you convert batches of any type of MS Office file to the WordPerfect format, and a new Document Map (similar to MS Word's) makes it easy to move from page to page in lenghty documents.

Other updates: The suite's Quattro Pro 11 spreadsheet now features QuickSubtotal, which simplifies data analysis by letting you apply totals to a selected column. And the Show On The Go feature in Corl Presentation 11 converts presentations into a self-executing slide shows that you play on any Windows computer. Presentations even allows you to save your work in the PowerPoint 95 and 97 file format (.ppt) just as WordPerfect supports Word 2002 (.doc) and Quattro Pro supports Excel 95 and 97 (.xls).

Wordperfect Office 11 is slightly less expensive alternative that doesn't sacrafice features, functionality, or any Microsoft interoperability.

sunbeam

I'm using it for a 300 page thesis and find it fine. Mind you my layout is relatively straightforward and I'm not using in-page footnotes. I couldn't make head or tail of the bibliography tool but there is work underway to revamp that.

My only real annoyance with the 1.0 version was that bullet spacing seemed to be off when a .doc file created in OpenOfffice was opened in Word. That seems to have been fixed in the 1.1 release. The export to PDF function in this version is also very useful.

elderlemon

Why not look at staroffice (http://www.hos.horizon.ie/staroffice/index.html?AssociateID=SUNIE). Its a pretty good imitation of MS Office.

Tom Dunne

Open Office is the free version of Star Office. You now have to pay for Star Office (it used to be free for personal use).

elderlemon

Actually thats not correct. Staroffice and Openoffice are based on the same source code (Sun donated this code to the openoffice project) but Sun has taken staroffice further by adding spell checker, thesaurus, more windows fonts, database etc.