Openoffice - Free alternative to Microsoft Office

movieman

Open Office wasnt that good in my experience.

Depends entirely on what you want to do. If you're one of the 1% of people who actually use the bells and whistles in Microsoft Office then Open Office won't work for you... but if you're one of the 99% who just type basic documents and create basic spreadsheets and presentations, it'll do fine.

As for PDFs, I much prefer direct export to some 'printer driver' kludge.

Astaroth

I dont think that using templates (user created not MS downloaded) for Powerpoint is "bells and whistles" personally but still

As I said, if you intend to use it as a stand alone for printing etc then it is good. If you are someone who shares work with other people using MS Office then I found it much more limited.

The true bells and whistles that I do use like MS Project and Project Server/ Exchange interface is kind of neither here nor there as OO doesnt have a project equiv

kingmonkey

Astaroth wrote:

Open Office obviously has no equiv of outlook so doesnt directly solve that problem and with Impress (the OO equiv of powerpoint) even though it says it is compatable with powerpoint I found that it frequently couldnt cope with files originally created in powerpoint and formatting was often messed up when going back to MS.

Is Outlook part of MS Office? There are outlook FOSS alternatives although in my opinion not that great at the moment. Try Evolution and Thunderbird. Also remember older and newer versions of Powerpoint are not fully 100% compatible.

Astaroth wrote:

I am sure that if you are using it as a stand alone product it will do everything the typical home user or small office would need but it is not a practical solution in my experience if you will be needing to share documents (with the need for others to edit so no PDF solution) with people using MS Office

The OpenDocument is the standard for documents now which OpenOffice 100% supports. Microsoft will be introducing support in the future, therefore sharing documents between MS Office and OO.o will be better.

I agree OpenOffice does everything a typical home user or office would need, but there are sometimes fancy formatting issues with OOo opening MS Office documents.

wolfman

For the home user OpenOffice is great, mainly because it's free and very functional.

Microsoft Office is a very good package too, although costs obviously. It's generally suited more to businesses, especially larger ones where cross package integration is much more important, and users are more likely to use the whole suite of applications.

£$&*"($£&(

Here's a simple example of why I like Open Office. We run a database at work called Recorder. Behind the scenes it's basically a Microsoft Access 97 database. We had a problem with the database which meant it had to edited in Access. While you can look at the database in Access 2000 (which is what we have at work) if you try and edit it, this completely stuffs it up. The concept of backwards compatibility seems to be rather a low priority for Microsoft. But we can open the database in Open Office and edit it with no harmful effects.

Bob63

wolfman wrote:

Microsoft Office is a very good package too, although costs obviously. It's generally suited more to businesses, especially larger ones where cross package integration is much more important, and users are more likely to use the whole suite of applications.

I know several large institutions, one of which has 35,000 employees, that use nothing but StarOffice. If everyone in an organisation used the same software then the compatibility argument becomes irrelevant.

Mike

Astaroth

kingmonkey wrote:

Is Outlook part of MS Office? There are outlook FOSS alternatives although in my opinion not that great at the moment. Try Evolution and Thunderbird. Also remember older and newer versions of Powerpoint are not fully 100% compatible.

It is listed on the MS Office website and is included in all the Office packages other than the "Basic"

I work for a large organisation so get to use the Microsoft Home Users Programme (ie the software is under my employers unlimited users licence and basically the only "catch" is that I would have to uninstall it if I were to leave them). I am actually surprised how few large companies that obviously have an unlimited users licence dont offer this scheme to their employees.

Astaroth

cheesy.mike wrote:

I know several large institutions, one of which has 35,000 employees, that use nothing but StarOffice. If everyone in an organisation used the same software then the compatibility argument becomes irrelevant.

Mike

But firstly StarOffice isnt free of charge and whilst based on the same base as OO it is different.

Secondly for other package intergration if you look at the likes of Mindmanager, SAS Base, Teamsite and a lot of other "business" applications they can all import and export to MS product specifications. Yes you can open a mindmanager ppt file with Impress but there are frequent formatting issues which if you are talking about a one off isnt that bad but if it is routinely being done is not cost effective in man hours.

wolfman

cheesy.mike wrote:

I know several large institutions, one of which has 35,000 employees, that use nothing but StarOffice. If everyone in an organisation used the same software then the compatibility argument becomes irrelevant.

I didn't mention compatibility??? I was talking about integration of packages within the same suite, something Office does do very well.

Also you may know several, but I'm sure there are hundreds if not thousands of businesses that don't use it. And what happens when you need to send a document outside of the company?

StarOffice costs money too. Maybe not as much as Microsoft Office, but it's still not completely free.

johnmcn

You can download microsoft office 2007 beta,you need to register for a activation code.

http://www.microsoft.com/uk/office/preview/beta/overview.mspx