Google’s free OpenOffice has recieved good reviews. Anybody had any experience with it? Any improvement over MS Office (other than not being MS!) or Lotus suite?
Google doesn’t own OpenOffice. Nobody really owns it. OpenOffice is open source meaning that many different people donate their time to build and constantly improve on a free application.
I have used it a little. For most users it works fine as a MS Office substitute. Where it tends to fall short is with extremely complicated documents and spreadsheets. It can import and save in MS Office formats so it is generally a painless switch and you can switch back to MS if you want.
Just give it a try if you are curious.
It certainly seems more barebones than MS Office, but comes in handy when Office is not available. It is a stable and useful alternative, but is not 100% compatible with certain files; in particular, it seems to have a bit of trouble with more complex Word documents. Personally, I use it on computers that don’t have Office installed, but I wouldn’t use it to supplant MS Office, the way I use Mozilla to supplant Internet Explorer.
I llove it.
I am not doing anyting really complicated though.
Maby I should use it for editing my posts.
I use NeoOffice/J, which is a variant of OpenOffice that uses more of the native MacOS X GUI toolkit. Takes forever to boot up, but other than that, it’s been pretty flawless for me.
My last big NeoOffice/J project was a PowerPoint presentation; did 90% of it there, then ported it to the MS Office at work and resolved a few font differences (mostly involving bullets).
I also use NeoOffice/J for the rare times I need to use Office. I’m a big fan. It takes a bit longer than MS Office to boot up, but that’s easily worth the $200 I didn’t have to spend on MS Office.
I’ve used it occassionally. Mainly because I sometimes write or edit Excel spreadsheets for use by people who only have access to Open Office. I use OO to check the the file is compatable. I have also found it useful in instances where saving some changes in MS Excel will crash the program, by making and saving the changes in OO I can then continue on in Excel having sidestepped whatever glitch was causing the crashes.
The main problem I have with it is that it doesn’t retain print settings in the same way that Excel does. What I usually have to do is save the print settings in OO, then open the file in Excel and save the print settings in that (they won’t be the same as those saved in OO), and then open it again in OO to ensure that it has retained its own print settings. This can be tedious when I have 15 sheets in a work book.
I haven’t used the OO inplace of Word or any other applications so can’t comment on them.
I use OO on Fedora Core 4. The “Writer” (word processor) isn’t bad, but I’d stay away from “Impress” (slidshows). It crashes all the time on my machine.
This question? seems more suited to IMHO.
Moved. samclem GQ moderator
Another satisfied NeoOffice/J user.
I own Excel (and I like Excel, I think Excel is the best thing Microsoft ever produced) but I do not own Word (and I hate Word with a blinding passion) and so I use NeoOffice/J when some nincompoop, laboring under the misguided assumption that a Word .doc file is a standard file format suitable for exchange with all other people, sends me one as a bloody file attachment.
I’ve been using OOo for years. Like everybody else said, the only thing it really has a problem with are really big, complex MS Words files. I haven’t had reason to use the presentation tool to give you an informed opinion, though.
Lately, I’ve found myself using AbiWord for word processing. It’s a helluva lot faster than OO.
Same deal with Gnumeric, with the added benefit that it can handle spreadsheets with up to 64,000 lines, vs 32,000 in OpenOffice.
Hell, while you’re grabbing those, get two other great GTK apps that are available on Windows:
GAIM, which beats the crap outta AIM and just about every other graphical IM client you can think of.
The GIMP, which at least beats the crap outta Photoshop on price, and comes close enough for just about everything else.
Open Office is derived from Star Office, which got bought by Sun. Sun still supports OO. Star Office is the supported version of OO.
I’ve been using Star Office since the 5.2 version. Version 8 has just been released. It has been getting a lot more compatible with Office over time - complex PPT figures used to confuse it, but I just imported a complex PPT file to write a pdf, and it worked fine. (OO and SO have built in PDF export. It’s not perfect - it doesn’t embed fonts, but it is not bad.)
The only incompatibility on SO V7 that annoyed me is that you can’t edit objects you inmport - such as a spreadsheet or drawing imported to a slide. That’s true for SO objects in PPT also, of course.
I have both on my home computer, and use SO most often. If you run on Linux, it is the best thing going.
I’ve recently been working with a large and complex MS Word document, and was having various problems that I could not solve with the formatting. I downloaded OpenOffice, and it fixed the problems I was having, but started producing a new bunch of problems. So while I have MS Word at work, I think I’ll continue to try to struggle with it, but I think I will use OO at home for simpler stuff.
I used OpenOffice for a while, but didn’t really see the advantage since I already had MS Office on the computer.
Mostly, I type things up for school/work in Word. For things that are mostly just for me and/or for whatever reason, appearance doesn’t matter quite as much, I use RoughDraft, which is very bare-bones, and (IMO) beautiful in it’s simplicity. Plus, the notepad feature is nice.