Open Office - thoughts?

[mthrockmor]

I bought a new computer and it had on it "Open Office." From what I can tell this is a free, open source version of Microsoft Office.

Has anyone used Open Office? If so, thoughts?

Thanks in advance!

Boo

[Triton28]

It's passable if you don't want to pay for MS Office.  If you're using the software a lot though, I'd say MS Office is worth it.

[Lusche]

Has anyone used Open Office? If so, thoughts?

Your AH stats master went from MS Office to Open Office many years ago and never looked back 

[bozon]

I use it. It works.

For anything word-processing longer than two pages I use latex anyway.

[Dragon]

I use it at home.  It's comparable to the M$ equivalent.

[DREDIOCK]

I bought a new computer and it had on it "Open Office." From what I can tell this is a free, open source version of Microsoft Office.

Has anyone used Open Office? If so, thoughts?

Thanks in advance!

Boo

I use it. My son used it all through college till he got a copy of MS office for free.

[Brooke]

It's passable if you don't want to pay for MS Office.  If you're using the software a lot though, I'd say MS Office is worth it.

I agree with this except that I like Thunderbird plus Lightning better than Outlook.  (Thunderbird and Lightning are not OpenOffice, though, but separate.)

I use OpenOffice at home and MS Office at work.  The main things are that complicated formatting in OO vs. MSOffice can be a bit different.  OO Calc has a different scripting language than Excel in case you have a lot of Excel stuff with scripts.  OO PowerPoint equivalent is rather crappy and a little buggy compared to MS PowerPoint, but it is free whereas the MS offering is expensive.

Overall, I like OO, and there is LibreOffice as well that I've heard is quite good (maybe better than OO).

[Rob52240]

I prefer openoffice to MS office.

[Bizman]

OpenOffice (or LibreOffice, the sidekick after Oracle bought Sun) work well if you aren't a trained heavy user of MS Office. They can produce interchangeable documents, but there are some things that can be done with MS Office only. IIRC macros were among them.  For a basic user they work equally well.

[guncrasher]

use it, see if it works for you.  if it doesnt you can always pay for ms later on.



semp

[eagl]

I like openoffice.  I used it for years until my employer paid for an employee purchase plan for the office suite we use at work, which lets me buy a single user license of office for $20.  I guess letting people use office at home is cheaper than having to train everyone up at work... 

I've tried a bunch of other free office-like suites, and open office was my favorite.  One thing though, it isn't a "free version of MS office".  It's completely different, duplicating many of the features of office and attempting to reverse-engineer some of the proprietary stuff in MS office such as their closed document formatting standards.  Ironically, the success of open office forced MS to start offering open-source document formatting standards several years ago, when saving MS office documents.

No reason to not use open office, unless you are sharing documents that have complicated formatting with people who have MS Office and who don't know how to select compatible formatting standards.

[SPKmes]

I used Open office a few back and thought it was OK... I then found Kingsoft which I prefer... I may have been doing something wrong with open office but it seemed clunky...I have no idea how to explain it hahaha.... but with kingsoft i use it on my home pc and my phone and it seems is compatible/comparable to excel...seems very similar.

[Gemini]

as someone said above, it's passable

however, someone opening your Open Office created document in MS Word will very likely see differences in the formatting/alignment to what you saw when you created it...so not ideal

[Widewing]

Open office works well and has good compatibility with Microsoft.. Good, not perfect.

However, I strongly suggest Libre Office, rather than Open Office.... It's also free and better than Open Office.

http://www.libreoffice.org/

[mthrockmor]

This has been great.

Bit of info. I am helping open a blended charter school and the question of students being able to submit documents without having to buy 350 MS licenses.

Next question. Google Docs has a form of Office. Would Open Office work well with Google Docs? What about Libre Office with Google Docs?

Thanks in advance!

Boo