Open Office

Nalz

Just curious to know how many of you lot out there use Open Office as apposed to Microsoft Office, and why?

thanks

dmeehan

1) i use on 1 computer at home, thats all. just to edit other office docs that were created on a pc with MS Office
2) its free

quad_red

Cos my laptop came with MS Works - spawn of Satan.

Don't have the need for MS Office at home that would justify the outlay on it. OpenOffice does me fine.

Goodshape

Office (MS or OO) wouldn't be a major requirement for anything I do, so I'm certainly not an office 'power user'. That said, Open Office fulfills all my needs and is :

-- Free
-- Available for Linux (as a web designer I switch between Linux and Windows a lot, so this is important.. no compatibility issues).
-- Saves and opens MS Office format if need be.

I spent some time last year working as a technical writer and was required to use MS Office. Absolutely hated it I have to say. I've since written some technical documentation in Open Office and found it much easier to get what I want done, without the annoying "helpful" MS popups, reminders and general bloat that microsoft seems to stuff into it's software.

Steve_TcK

Hi there,

I Use open office as you can load it onto PC, Mac & Linux
and it loads the MS Office items with no probs

ohh and it FREE !





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Khannie

I use OpenOffice because I'm running linux.

Also, it's very good.

Oh...and freeness.

projectmayhem

i use it too for the same reasons as listed above... primarily because of it's cost (and lack thereof)

Ruu_Old

I use it, works great and its free like the others have pointed out.

Orion

I use OO.o. It's free which is one very valid reason. It does everything that MS Office does ( that I need anyway) with a few extra features such as exporting to pdf that MSO doesn't have. And all this in a fraction of the diskspace while remaining free. I actually find it a lot more user friendly that MS Office.

I've recently started using the Portable version on my usb drive (see my other thread re: this) which means I can open OO files anywhere now. I'd like to see MS create a version of Office that'll fit on a keyring

zilog_jones

I see nothing that MS Office has which OOo doesn't (except for Outlook, but that's pretty useless if you're not in an MS Exchange environment), so I see no reason to pay whatever hideous price they're asking for these days.

Though saying all this, I've tried the MS Office 2007 beta, and it seems actually promising...

dubmick

Can I ask you why you think Outlook is useless if not used in an exchange environment, just curious?

zilog_jones

Because all the functionality is pretty much designed to work with Exchange. Without Exchange, it's just a bloated email client - Thunderbird and Opera do POP3/IMAP/NNTP a lot better and more efficiently.

kdouglas

use openoffice in both windows and linux, find it to be much better than microsoft and its free

Explosive_Cornflake

I move between linux and windows, and it's free. Only thing i don't like about it is the slide show behaviour in Impress.

Rollo Tamasi

I have both at the moment but i'll be switching over gradually in a similar way in which I went from IE to Firefox and now slowly to Opera. Its hard to become familar with something that is part of parcell of the MS computing enviornment but OO provides an easy solution and it is the image of MSWord tbh. Change over is not that much of a problem, it's just instead of automtically clicking on a W i need to click on a seagull or whatever the feck it is.

Nalz

zilog_jones wrote:

Though saying all this, I've tried the MS Office 2007 beta, and it seems actually promising...

yeah I hear there are some big changes, especially with the UI

SouperComputer

Thunderbird and Opera do POP3/IMAP/NNTP

Maybe as an email client only its a bit poinless outside exchange, but if you use a PDA and use it as an organiser as it was intended its pretty handy. Actually, ive tried a rake of open source (SLOX, Egroupware, SurgarCRM etc etc) stuff and still find Outlook is the best overall.

Back on topic.............

I use Open Office because:

1. Its free
2. Its cross platform, in any given day ill switch from windows to *nix to OS X many times, so having the cross playform ability is good.
3. It exports to PDF
4. It does EVERYTHING I need it to do. That said, my needs are pretty basic.

So bearing in mind if does everything I want, is free AND exports to PDF I would be mad to pay for M$ office on each machine here.

Only downside to OO is that is pretty slow and bloated to start in comparison to M$ office.

riptide

M$ Office here. I'm a heavy Excel user.

the_syco

I do. Why? Because when I downloaded the newest warez version of MS Office, I didn't like it, so I got Open Office. Looks the same, a bit different, but it does what I need done, so meh. I don't give a damn if its free: I could get MS Office for free, but I use Open Office.

Capt'n Midnight

zilog_jones wrote:

(except for Outlook, but that's pretty useless if you're not in an MS Exchange environment), so I see no reason to pay whatever hideous price they're asking for these days..

Don't forget that Exchange CAL's cover the use of Outlook so it's a zero cost client for that. Outlook just won't work happily with LDAP - remember it's an exchange client with support for other protocols like imap. As SuperComputer points out Outlook is good for PDA's and it's usually free with the windows CE ones.

A couple of times I've had problems with OO that were fixed by a later release. You can see the quality improving. Yes it's a memory hog. But you can buy a LOT of ram for the cost of an office license. Actually you can buy a new computer (without monitor) for the same price as an M$ office license !

OO has some nice tricks, printing some large documents can be freakly fast compared to word / excel.

If like 90% of users you don't use the advanced features then OO is the biz.

Base won't replace Access but compatibility across versions of Access is a bit like an adventure game.

They don't charge extra for foreign langague dictioneries or interfaces.

There is the whole security thing - seriously if you use Word there are wopping great big holes patched this month - and macros are plain scary

I'm also tired of M$ messing with the interface and renaming things and changing defaults between different versions of the program and the inconsistant options between members of the same famile - where is the "always create backup copy" for all documents in Excel ? Where is the "create backup copy in Access" - features that were standard 20 years ago in the rest of the industry /RANT

Tom Dunne

For light use, OO all the way.

But, and sadly it's a big but, for any sort of heavy writing, I have to say I would never use OO again.

I decided to write my Masters thesis in OO seeing as I was switching between Windows and Linux all the time and I have to say I found it quite a challenge. I had loads of problems with indexing, referencing, graphics and many more that I can't think of right now.

dathiultaigh

I just started using OO about 1 month ago and find it pretty good to use. I dont use a hell of a lot of features on it and its still a wee bit unfamilar but its grand. The reasons why I switched were ...

Its free
Its cross platform
It exports to PDF
It does EVERYTHING I need it to do. That said, my needs are pretty basic.
It aint M$