Open office or Office 2003?

Bikertov

-TangleFoot- wrote: »

That's probably because it's called Asterisk.

Woops - was typing to quickly to check the correct spelling. Of course Asterix was the French cartoon character.

Simple mistake - said the Dalek, climbing off the dustbin !

Money_Grabber13579

computershack wrote: »

Beware that OpenOffice is only about 90% compatible. It has issues with some functions not being supported in Exel and layout issues in all. If you're not a power user and watch out for the layout issues you should be OK - can always save Word docs as RTF. It will open .docx though which MSO2003 won't.

Office 2003 will open .docx documents. All you need is the free 2007 compatibility pack from the Microsoft website.

PhilCo_2

Just put both on and see which you like best. The main problem with OO is that it has it's own macro language so any MS ones you use won't work and creating OO macros is a real pain. There are other niggley things you'll find with OO if you're used to MS such as having to create cell styles before creating conditional formatting and not being able to reference a named range from a different sheet in dropdowns.

totalsolutions

Office 2010 Beta is even free on PcPro cover DVD out now.
It's fine and works until October 2010

pcombo

Wouldn't surprise me that half of you are using illegal version so office yet given out advice not to use one.

[Deleted User]

pcombo wrote: »

Wouldn't surprise me that half of you are using illegal version so office yet given out advice not to use one.

Some of us are fortunate enough to have both ethics and morals, thank you very much :rolleyes:

System

PhilCo wrote: »

Just put both on and see which you like best. The main problem with OO is that it has it's own macro language so any MS ones you use won't work and creating OO macros is a real pain. There are other niggley things you'll find with OO if you're used to MS such as having to create cell styles before creating conditional formatting and not being able to reference a named range from a different sheet in dropdowns.

It still has a problem on basic translation of formatting. I would not recommend OO if you have to give stuff to people using Office.

http://www.infoworld.com/d/applications/office-compatibility-torture-test-302?page=0,0

And the things in the above tests were not anything fancy either.

fwor

I used MS Office for many years and then moved to OpenOffice two years ago. It's true that there are a few things that don't always render exactly right, but I've never found a Word/Excel document or spreadsheet that is not completely intelligible when transferred to OO.

If I were still producing documents professionally then I would definitely use Word - because the layout that I see would have to be exactly the same as what the customer sees. But for most people, it's really not that critical.

In some ways the article that you quote misses the point of OpenOffice. The developers have more limited resources than MS and are probably more concerned about making the core of their software work properly than slavishly following everything that MS does. If you pointed out to them the slight differences in hanging indents, I doubt that they would be very concerned.

System

I linked to the article with the intention of pointing out to the 'you can use OO instead of Office' brigade that it is definitely not always the case and that there are severe shortcomings if you share documents with Office users.
Use it by all means but please stop stating that it is a replacement for Office.

This is no different to Wordperfect's hype of many moons ago that Wordperfect 5 would render Office 4.3 docs correctly.

GT60

mutley74 wrote: »

interesting if this is a full working version?

i been told i can get discounted MS software from scome software education link as my kid is still in school! otherwise i will try OO and not my copy of MS 2003!

Is this the school link?

http://www.rm.com/shops/thebasement/Default.aspx

It is what our sons school's web site link to.

If you have a version of office 03 why not just use that and get all the updates, service packs and patches etc?
I run "xp pro works/ office" on vista and have no problems.
Niall