I need Excel! Is Openoffice any good?

Stompa

Open Office is generally pretty good. I did find that the database application was a bit flaky though - seemed to crash fairly frequently.

student100

wolfman wrote: »

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

I suppose it's partly horses for courses. If you're not bothered about having Outlook (I use a combination of Thunderbird and Google Calendar, and sync both with my Windows Mobile PDA phone using a couple of useful third-party applications) then OpenOffice.org (OOo) is pretty much the same as MS Office in terms of functionality.

In fact OOo has some features that MS Office lacks... like a wonderful built-in PDF converter (with all sorts of clever options in the latest version), and the Draw application. Also, I was recently writing my dissertation in OOo, and using the Bibliography features which I took for granted also existed in MS Office - until I spoke to a friend who was struggling to create a bibliography in Word and revealed that actually Word doesn't have this feature at all! I guess it's something not many people would use that often, but for students it's pretty important.

dbrooke

Hello

I'd be interested to know which apps you use to sync Thunderbird with your PDA.

Dudley

student100

Dudley, to save this going off topic too much, I've posted a new thread.
http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.html?p=5326695

wolfman

student100 wrote: »

I suppose it's partly horses for courses. If you're not bothered about having Outlook (I use a combination of Thunderbird and Google Calendar, and sync both with my Windows Mobile PDA phone using a couple of useful third-party applications) then OpenOffice.org (OOo) is pretty much the same as MS Office in terms of functionality.

I use the same. For personal use Google Calendar is great. For business use though Outlook is superior.

Also I think someone mentioned OO is quicker. It's not. Office 2007 opens faster, and uses less memory. Sometimes twice as fast, and half the memory from the benchmarks I've seen. Although OO is multi-platform, where as Office 2007 is designed for one platform, and Windows at that, which will be where the advantage is gained.

It also inter-operates much better. You can drag between the different applications easily. And the new Ribbons interface, while taking time to learn is very powerful. Much like the introduction of tabbed browsing.

student100 wrote: »

In fact OOo has some features that MS Office lacks... like a wonderful built-in PDF converter (with all sorts of clever options in the latest version), and the Draw application.

We use the PDF addon for Office 2007:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=4D951911-3E7E-4AE6-B059-A2E79ED87041&displaylang=en

student100 wrote: »

Also, I was recently writing my dissertation in OOo, and using the Bibliography features which I took for granted also existed in MS Office - until I spoke to a friend who was struggling to create a bibliography in Word and revealed that actually Word doesn't have this feature at all! I guess it's something not many people would use that often, but for students it's pretty important.

Word 2007 does have a bibliography feature. I've not used it, but if you google about you'll see it getting a lot of praise.


Don't get me wrong. I use OpenOffice at home in my Linux setup. And I think it's great, especially for free. For general use it's fine. Even professionally it's fine, but that's where it doesn't yet compete with Office 2007. Office XP, or 2003 yeah ok, but not Office 2007. Apart from the .Net framework, Office is one of the best things Microsoft has going for it.

irnbru_2

student100 wrote: »

Also, I was recently writing my dissertation in OOo, and using the Bibliography features

Pah! Shoulda used LaTeX

student100

irnbru wrote: »

Pah! Shoulda used LaTeX

Aye, but 1. my dissertation is about a comparison algorithm for OpenDocument files, so it kind of seemed appropriate to use OpenDocument format for the writeup; and 2. I'd rather see what's going on


Oh yeah...native OpenDocument support is one major plus point of OpenOffice.org (yes, I know about the converter for Word, and yes, I know about OOXML...they're both steps in the right direction, but not very good really).

To be honest I've not yet even seen Office 2007 being used, let alone used it, so it might be amazing, but I expect for me personally OOo still has bigger advantages.

pipmoss

Help I have microsoft office 2000 and my excel programme will not work correctly. When I go to open the programme it says that I need to insert disc. My PC came with Office 2000 pre-loaded and therefore i do not have a cd.

Thanks in advance.

superscaper

You're better off starting a new thread than adding to an old one.