I need Excel! Is Openoffice any good?

superscaper

pennymakespounds wrote: »

http://direct.tesco.com/q/R.200-4544.aspx

never see this mentioned much .. tesco office for £20 ... word & exel equiv.. and compatable with microsoft .

any good ??

ps .. appears to be one of six items they have.
http://direct.tesco.com/q/buylist/id.694.aspx

It's not as compatible with Microsoft apps as it makes out and is certainly inferior to open office. So if you can get a better product for free, that's the reason it isn't mentioned. You've only got two options, if you don't mind spending the money, buy MS Office in one of it's various versions. If you want to save money then use Open office. I don't see the point in wasting £20 for something worse than open office and with a smaller support community.

I don't think there is any software Tesco offer that you can't get better for free.

jt2k6

Give it a try

you don't say what you teach but everything you will need is there, IMHO i prefare it now to excel, trying to convince my company to use it instead, but apparently because we share a lot documentation with our parent company in Japan there are issues (can't see what they are, i think the company doesn't want to be seen as cheap, or the fact that someone in IT used to work for microsoft might have something to do with it)

I find OO better laid out, faster, creates smaller file sizes, AND IT'S FREE!!!

don't use anything else at home.

deffinatly try it, it's free if you don't loke it what have you lost?

TTFN

jt2k6

pennymakespounds wrote: »

http://direct.tesco.com/q/R.200-4544.aspx

never see this mentioned much .. tesco office for £20 ... word & exel equiv.. and compatable with microsoft .

any good ??

ps .. appears to be one of six items they have.
http://direct.tesco.com/q/buylist/id.694.aspx

I saw this to,

I may be wrong but I thought the item packaged by tesco WAS open office, what you get for your £20 was the package on CD with a "easy" installer and some phone "support"

I wouldn't touch it but maybe useful if you don't have internet and VERY limited computer knowledge,

but like I said I may be wrong, (could it be ability office)

ttfn

irnbru_2

steb wrote: »

I need to have a spreadsheet program and ideally would like Excel but it is expensive.

Gnumeric is also available for windows.

superscaper

jt2k6 wrote: »

I saw this to,

I may be wrong but I thought the item packaged by tesco WAS open office, what you get for your £20 was the package on CD with a "easy" installer and some phone "support"

I wouldn't touch it but maybe useful if you don't have internet and VERY limited computer knowledge,

but like I said I may be wrong, (could it be ability office)

ttfn

It isn't open office (I think they'd be breaking the GPL if it was for charging more than material cost). You are correct about the guess of Ability Office.
Likewise the security software is based on Panda.

jt2k6

I didn't think the GPL put limits on the amount you could charge, guessed it was what people were willing to pay, I got debain on 14 CD's from e-bay for £15 (only had dial up at time)

I thought ability office was a better call.

slightly OT but is anyone using Google docs & spreadsheet? another option that is cheap (free) and you can access it anywhere with a internet connection and no more memory sticks (lost count how many I have lost)

TTFN

superscaper

jt2k6 wrote: »

I didn't think the GPL put limits on the amount you could charge, guessed it was what people were willing to pay, I got debain on 14 CD's from e-bay for £15 (only had dial up at time)

True, looking at the GPL, they'd only have to make sure they provided the source code and/or link to openoffice. Charging £20 for freeware would be way over the top in my view. But moot point as it isn't open office. And open office is still better and definitely much more compatible with MS products. I remember someone coming on this board a while ago because they couldn't open a word document at all with tesco's office. I think OO did the trick in that case.

student100

To the original poster, OpenOffice.org is excellent, I wouldn't use MS Office now unless you paid me...


To the geeks ... OOo is LGPL, which means you can link to it in commercial/proprietary software and charge whatever you want.

steb_2

Thanks everyone for your replies. :T

I am going to try to download Openoffice and give it a try as lots of you seem to like it. :beer:

wolfman

Open Office is well worth trying. Great for home use.

As to it being better than Office, it's not. It's still got some way to go, Office is a very well evolved suite of products. Especially Office 2007 which has really upped the mark.

If you can get Office cheaply then it's usually worth it. You may as well try Open Office first though and see how you go as it won't cost you a penny.