OpenOffice.org

GeminiMan

Member
So, I basically had no idea that this program existed until just a few hours ago. I was just about ready to break down and buy Microsoft Office Home & Student before I move out for school this week, but then in looking for the best price online, I found this. I think I'm falling in love. Anyone else tried this out much at all? Any additional pros or cons that I may not have encountered after a moderate amount of tinkering? It all seems to run pretty much the same as MS Office, and I'm very impressed with the cross-program compatibility they've done (such as being able to save an OpenOffice file as a Word document). My only complaint at this time is that their Word equivalent doesn't seem to have a grammar check, not that that was immensley useful in the first place.
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The wordprocessor and spreadsheet applications are fine. I found that the presentation application is cumbersome. I did not like it.

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I've used OpenOffice for a number of years now, and I'm very satisfied with it. It does everything I've ever needed it to do. Even NeoOffice for Mac is a great alternative to MS Word.

That said, MS Word is a mature, stable product, so I would never recommend against anyone using it.
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I'd take office 2k7 over openoffice any day, I just didn't feel like it was polished enough for my daily use, and it certainly was not up to par performance wise with office. Granted, that's because office can use all those secret APIs to be faster and snappier, but that's not my concern. Faster is faster. I do see it's value as a superb free alternative though, but office is really worth every penny.
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I used the presentation application many times to create presentations. but I'd recommend staroffice as it is slightly upgraded from the openoffice.org core. It's included in google pack for free now, but I bought mine from sun.
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> I do see it's value as a superb free alternative though, but office is
>really worth every penny.

I haven't tried OpenOffice yet, but I probably will soon since for the time being the sole word processor/etc. on my laptop aside from WordPad is... Microsoft Works. I don't know why, the machine came with it. BUT I actually prefer, for the time being, Works to Office, because Office drives me crazy. The word processor I'm USED to using is Corel's WordPerfect suite, and I find it so much easier to use and more streamlined than Word ever will be.

WordPerfect has a much better spelling/grammar checker than Word has ever seemed to, even though I only usually use it to catch a couple mistakes, and overall I feel like I can find features and change attributes FAR more easily in WP. One of the little things that has always bugged me about Word, without even having to use the program to see it, is the way they represent margins. I really hate not being able to see on the page itself where my page is supposed to end if I'm going to have to play around with the margins to get something to fit. WP shows your margins with a light line along them on the page, and makes it very simple to change both vertical and horizontal margins. To my knowledge, Office still has yet to do anything like this, and it feels pretty wonky to type on what looks like an entire page but... has "secret" margins you find when you reach them.

Then again, I pretty much started out using WordPerfect anyway... I think early on I had the choice, though, since I'm currently using an Office 95 CD case (with the CDs still in it, since they haven't been used in ages) as a coaster on my desktop computer, here. I have also almost NEVER found ANY Microsoft program to be very intuitive to me (like IE, Outlook, or-- yep-- the whole Office suite) except for MSN... and even it still feels a little awkward to me. I have no troubles with the operating systems (barring Vista, naturally), but for as long as I can remember I haven't been able to stand using something that's by Microsoft for more than a brief time unless there's no alternative that's better.

That's just my two cents, though. I will go give OpenOffice a shot, anyway! I've been meaning to.
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