Openoffice - Free alternative to Microsoft Office

Bob63

b.t.w. OpenOffice 2.0.3 has just been released.

Key features of the new release:

* performance improvements: for example, a 23 percent improvement in certain Calc benchmarks
* further improvements to file format compatibility with Microsoft Office files
* new email integration features for users wanting to send emails in Microsoft file formats
* more control over how exported PDF documents will display when opened in a PDF reader
* support for more languages and improvements in hyphenation and thesaurus
* support for Intel architecture for Mac OS X plus improved Mac OS X System integration
* built-in check for updated versions

Jolly_Roger

I just began using Open Office this week as part of a longer term strategy aimed at getting rid of MS on my computer! Somebody else on the Forum suggested downloading it for free and trying it out. I am a freelance journalist and mostly use Word to write in. I wanted something similar and free. Well, it appears to work fine, but does appear to be slightly slow in starting as somebody else mentioned. But was stunned me was how similar it looks to Word 6.0, which I also have. The similarties are scary. But, tell me, how is it possible to legally save an open source document as Word 6.0, which is 100% possible using the Save As... prompt. Why does MS allow Open Office to do that? Seems nuts to me!
Can anybody help me with one slight problem. I am trying to change the document template so that it always open in Tacoma, 14 and UK English, but I cannot find any way of making this my default. Am I being blind?
PS. Unless you really do need MS Office (which is VERY expensive), there appears to be no need to stump up so much cash, especially when you can send and receive documents as Word 6.0.

danmanchester

Jolly_Roger wrote:

Can anybody help me with one slight problem. I am trying to change the document template so that it always open in Tacoma, 14 and UK English, but I cannot find any way of making this my default. Am I being blind?

No you're not being blind - just takes a while to get used to any new software.

(Edit-to make Writer open in English UK as default - go to Tools/Options/Language Settings/Languages - and set the default language for all documents as English UK (make sure the "for current document only" is unticked) and click OK then continue with the instructions below:

To get Writer to open in you default font/size (set it to-in your case Tahoma 14)

1. Save the document by choosing File - Templates - Save and saving the document in the My Templates category.
2. Choose File - Templates - Organize.
3. Double-click My Templates in the list on the left. You will see the user-defined templates in the user directory specified under Tools - Options - OpenOffice.org - Paths. Select the template you have just saved and open the context menu or open the submenu of the Commands button.
4. Choose Set As Default Template. The next time you open a new text document, the new document will be based on the new default template.

:money:

Jolly_Roger

Great! Done that.
Now...
Just imported text from a Word document, which is not usually a problem. However, the document was written by somebody in Bratislava and the opening and closing quote marks ("___") are all wrong. In Slovakia, it seems that the opening quote is placed not at the top of the line, but rather at the bottom, while the close quotes mark is the same as our opening quote mark. I tried switching to a US keyboard (pressing left hand shift and Alt), but this doesn't solve the problem. Any ideas of how I can do this change automatically?

djohnsonhk

sublime wrote:

I haven't explored all the stuff, and the initial startup isn't that slow. Also it pre-loads stuff into the taskbar so over the course of a session i.e. using excel, word, powerpoint or whatever the load times once it's loaded is pretty much 0 seconds.

Java is much better than people give it credit for and it's not a memory hog really like word is.

I just ran a mini-test. I closed the quickstarter and opened a 33 page document (1.6mb in size) took about 5 seconds. I closed the app (and now had the quickstart in my taskbar) and it took less than one second.

Since I don't have office installed anymore I can't do the same test, but I can bet you it wouldn't be as fast as this, let alone when trying to use 5 different pieces of the software.

Slight thing though - the OpenOffice quickstarter uses about 35mb of memory just sitting there, possibly slowing down everything else on your computer (unless you have a souped up PC). I personally HATE quickstarters as they use up a load of memory when you have Quicktime, MSN, Realplayer, etc etc automatically loading into the taskbar.

I know Java ain't that bad (I'm actually a Java developer), but it'll never be faster than programs written written for the specific OS.