Open Office v Microsoft Office

[Meltingpot]

The problem is not using the native formats and exporting to other formats as required. My son found that one out when he tried to work in word format in OOo on his Eee and lost all his course work. There are loads of free alternatives so maybe it would be a foolish to part with money for MS offerings. For word processing I use abiword.

Here are a few alternative word processors:

http://go-oo.org/
http://www.abisource.com/
http://www.jarte.com/

Being based on OOo, go-oo is possibly the way forward if you want a full blown office replacement

I'd also like to put in a word for Jarte, which is a small and very neat word processor for home use. The free version does most of what you need and the registered version isn't expensive.

 

[BlueSquareThing]

No!!!!!

if I get another wireframe for a fucking web page done in fucking powerpoint I will kill a motherfucker

Promise I wasn't thinking about stuff like that

 

[dlx1]

Invalid MS Office - should I worry?

read read this as in same boat had thsi copy for 5+ years not saying not genuine ! office 03

So the out come of this three page long thread is Open office shit if I send a CV or other doc make in Open office and someone opens in MS word would doc open and fount & tabs be in right places?

I just use Word a sometime Excel why should I pay for Power point rubbish.

Microsoft said the download of the notification component was "voluntary," and that it has started to push the software to users today. Because the program is launching over several months, not everyone will see it immediately.

I didn't voluntary or download program

edit: ta Jonti

 

[Jonti]

if I send a CV or other doc make in Open office and someone opens in MS word would doc open and fount & tabs be in right places?

Yeah.

To be really safe, use the RTF file format. It's more portable than *.doc.

 

[oicur0t]

Yeah.

To be really safe, use the RTF file format. It's more portable than *.doc.

or use the portable document format!

 

[Jonti]

Oh yes!

And just to clarify, do work in the open-office document format ~ save the finished document in whatever proprietary format you please (doc rtf pdf whatever), but keep your working version in something like open document text (*.odt).

Reason is, the application won't have to keep translating to and from foreign formats, but only has to do it once. So there's far less chance of errors creeping in!

 

[ch750536]

I use google docs, works really well.

 

[oicur0t]

I use google docs, works really well.

We use google docs here at work and it's great to work on files at the same time as someone else...

There's also zoho too. I would probably choose these two over oo personally and tbh, I haven't opened up MS Office all the time I have been here.

 

[tarannau]

Office 2007 is bloated, but it's the same old shit that I'm wearily accustomed to. It's a dollied up version perhaps, but it's not a massive step forward afaic. Wouldn't swap Excel and Word easily, but Powerpoint is still vastly predictable and crap.

Open Office is just poor all round.

 

[Jonti]

Blimey, that's told 'em!

There's some informed comment here, here, and here.

A sample ...

One of OpenOffice’s great traits is its ability to work with many other office suite file formats. You can save your documents as MS Word (or many other) documents and they will open up just as you intended in Word. One nifty feature of OpenOffice that I’ve found myself using repeatedly in college has been the “Export Directly as PDF” button. Located next to the print button on the toolbar, this button acts just like a normal save button, but it saves your document as an Adobe PDF file. This comes in very handy for making sure that your professor and classmates are going to be seeing your work exactly as you want them to, no matter what operating system or office suite they use.

That brings me to another nice feature of OpenOffice; it’s cross-platform compatible. This means that you can use OpenOffice on practically any computer running any OS. The list of supported OS’s includes Windows, OS X, Linux, and even Solaris and BSD. Microsoft Office can’t match OpenOffice for cross-platform compatibility.

 

[tarannau]

Gawd, you're like a pro-Linux promo-drone. You seem to ignore what anyone relates to you in favour of CnPing some marketing text.

As many on here have pointed out, OO's formatting often doesn't work perfectly in MS Office. That's perhaps to be expected - versions of MS Office aren't always perfectly compatible - but OO's had some genuinely nasty formatting issues ime.

As for the 'Export to PDF' capability, it's hardly a huge deal, is it? Every edition of Mac OSX has been able to do that at a simple, system level for years

Same goes for the cross-platform capability - why blow the trumpet on unremarkable features that have been present for over 5 years elsewhere. It seems weird, especially when you're so keen to dismiss others users' views on OO.

 

[editor]

I tried Open Office. I wanted to like it, but swiftly went back to my eight year old copy of Word.

Why? Because it was better, that's why.

 

[BlueSquareThing]

As for the 'Export to PDF' capability, it's hardly a huge deal, is it? Every edition of Mac OSX has been able to do that at a simple, system level for years

If it was that easy then people would never stick Word docs on the net or in e-mail attachments though would they?

Export to PDF is a good thing. It's a reason we keep copies of OO floating around at work.

The other reason is that we give it to kids who only have Works or something on the machines they buy. The price is a good enough reason to do that fwiw.

 

[FridgeMagnet]

Actually I agree that Export to PDF is very handy - "how do I do this as a PDF?" is up there as one of the most common Word questions I remember. It is also in general much, much better than any other program in terms of reading and writing to obscure formats, so it's always a good idea to have one hanging around, just in case you find something written with WordStar 3.0 that's absolutely vital.

However I wouldn't use it day to day because I have a Mac, and the Mac version is pretty shit really. And iWork is cheap and good.

 

[editor]

I fucking hate PDFs and hate it when people send me a tiny document encased in one.

That is all.

 

[magneze]

OpenOffice works fine, really can't understand some of the comments on here. Most of the issue with is the ubiquity of the Word .doc file format IMO.