Open Office vs Microsoft Office

Peter B

A client of mine has downloaded "Windows Genuine Advantage Notification" as an automatic update from microsoft.

Now he is getting loads of "You have not a genuine copy of Windows".

Yes his copy of Windoows is not legit so he is thinking of purchasing a valid copy.

His version of Office is also not legit so he is wondering will the genuine software tool will pick that up and if so, if he was to get Open Office how does that compare to Microsoft Office?

Can you open Microsoft Office files and run Macro's, conditional forumlas etc with Open Office?

Is there any obvious flaws to Open Office?

Thanks

aidan_r

vba macros may be a problem, though if he really needs that then just buy microsoft office

majiktripp

Open office is very comparible to the MS version,as for the genuine notification I dont believe this is one for MS Office just yet.I would highly recommend Open office but I think the best thing he could do is install it and test it out to see if its what he needs,if not spring for student/teacher edition of MS Office for €180

el Bastardo

OO and MSO have similar feature set but macros could be a problem.

That genuine annoyance tool can be uninstalled, perfectly legit AFAIK. It'd nearly be cheaper to buy a budget Dell with OEM licencing than to fork out for retail versions of office and xp.

Zapho

OO is just as good as MSO, if not better. (I use it full time now, I never use MSO anymore. MSO always annoyed me, most of the annoyances in MSO don't appear in OO. Thats my opinion anyway.

OO will open up MSO documents no problem, and can also save them too.But! It can, sometimes,however rarely, mess up the formatting of say a word document. But thats easily fixed. Also OO lets you save directly to PDF without needing an extra plugin.

As mentioned above, there may be trouble opening MSO documents that contain macros in OO.

Capt'n Midnight

Zapho wrote:

It can, sometimes,however rarely, mess up the formatting of say a word document. But thats easily fixed.
...
As mentioned above, there may be trouble opening MSO documents that contain macros in OO.

To be blunt, changing versions of word frequently messes up the format of tables so it's not just open office.

re macros - OO is less susceptible to macro viruses than office, just depends on how much you like vba macros - if you have a lot of docs with them then you are probably locked into M$ , and if using older documents be aware that the default file save options of some macro functions has changed between versions of office

main annoyance for me is that it uses ; instead of , in Excel formulas

overall if something in OO is broken then there is a good chance it will be fixed in a later version