Alternate to Word

PROLIANT

poocano78 wrote: »

If I had not received Microsoft Office for free I would have never paid for the overpriced junk...

Can you intergrate Thunderbird into Microsoft Exchange as is? No, Open Office is an option for folk who cant afford a full blown business-class, high quality office system, nothing that runs on the Win32/64 platform comes near to the genuine Microsoft products, same way that Open Office integrates in to a Unix/Linux system better than any Microsoft product.
Yes open office is good, but Microsoft Office is better.

spud17

Yes open office is good, but Microsoft Office is better.

It pains me to agree.

I'm probably about 50/50 Linux/XP, I was given a copy of Office2000 Premium and have used it to teach myself some basics, including compiling charts and tables.

Pretty basic stuff.

When I last had a big sort out (new HD) etc I decided to modernise and use Open Office, but I've found that the charts are now embedded in sheets, some of the formulae don't appear to work and the labels on charts are missing or in odd formatting.

I have therefore reverted to Office 2000/XP for my records, while in the near future I hope to try Open Office 3.0 on Linux.

Sorry to stray off topic slightly.

BenL

Hi

In addition to the openoffice solution you may want to check that it wasn't just the launch icon that has been removed from your pc for Word.

Start - Run - then type winword and click ok.

Word might still be installed, just no menu option or icon on the desktop.

patman99

Hey Proliant, if MS Office is so good, how come the South Korean Govt. has canned-it in favour of Openoffice.org?, and they are not the only ones, several Govt. depts. in various countries (inc. the US) are deploying Openoffice too.

Maybe its time for MS to adopt the Sun/OOO approach. Give the office package away for free, then simply charge for support.

Having an office suite that can still open documents created in the original release (unlike MS Office) does have its advantages.

Aiadi

patman99 wrote: »

how come the South Korean Govt. has canned-it in favour of Openoffice.org?, and they are not the only ones, several Govt. depts. in various countries (inc. the US) are deploying Openoffice too.

hmmmmm. Could it be because it is cheap?

GunJack

One problem with starting to use openoffice for your excel spreadsheets is that any macros you have in your xls workbooks don't seem to translate over into the openoffice equivalent prog. Not a problem for most, I would assume, but for me that's a big down side

DatabaseError

patman99 wrote: »

Hey Proliant, if MS Office is so good, how come the South Korean Govt. has canned-it in favour of Openoffice.org?, and they are not the only ones, several Govt. depts. in various countries (inc. the US) are deploying Openoffice too....

$ and politics, of course

(where's the cluebat smiley? )

[Deleted User]

patman99 wrote: »

Hey Proliant, if MS Office is so good, how come the South Korean Govt. has canned-it in favour of Openoffice.org?, and they are not the only ones, several Govt. depts. in various countries (inc. the US) are deploying Openoffice too.

South Korea are moving away from any software that they have to pay for.

Public bodies are not a good benchmark for the quality of a product, especially since public bodies will come under fire for anything they do that can be done cheaper, especially free elsewhere.

Maybe its time for MS to adopt the Sun/OOO approach. Give the office package away for free, then simply charge for support.

Why should they need too? Have they done that with Operating Systems even though for the last fifteen years they've had competition from various distributions of Linux in both the Workstation and Server market? They're still commanding over 95% of the Office market, there's no cause for concern.

Having an office suite that can still open documents created in the original release (unlike MS Office) does have its advantages.

[/quote]

Lets look at two scenarios.

1) You send someone a file you've created and they are unable to open it within their Office Suite and need to install a plugin to be able to view, edit and save it.

or

2) You send someone a file you've created and they can open it, edit it and save it in the exact same format with no use of plugins.

Which is the more flexible? The ODF is option 1 and the .doc format is option 2.