I searched for a thread about this but didn’t find one, although, to be perfectly honest I only ran two searches and then got tired of waiting, so I may have missed one.
I am interested in thoughts about OpenOffice vs. Google Docs. Which has greater functionality? Which is easier to learn and use? What advantages and disadvantages does the Cloud aspect of Google Docs offer? As well as anything else you can think of.
Google Docs is definitely easier to access and use. But not that much easier than Open Office. Google Docs functions best with at least at 3.0 DL speed, where as Open Office doesn’t really matter once you install it.
Google docs is nice, handy, and easily accessible from any computer, but open office is far more powerful with a much deeper feature set. MS office adds a layer above and beyond OO but we expect that for the price.
OK, since I don’t have much time to explore on my own – I’ll let some of you with experience try to answer.
I liked OO a lot, but it’s unusable, as of the time I tried it, in that one can’t assign CTRL keys to insert special characters (accents over letters/under, for example, or special characters like that funny looking little “ss” thing in German, or, for that matter, a section symbol). Macros are not good enough, nor fast enough, nor is using the numeric keypad. I need to go back to Word for this basic usability.
Does GoogleDocs include basic functionality for writing where regular use of accented characters is customizable, or is it stuck in macro/character map mode, like OO?
We used OO at work for several years with no issues so “unusable” is a bit strong
It didn’t do what you needed .. fine, it worked for our needs with no problem (we didn’t use Macros, and I never investigated to find out if you could use Macros)
I respect that – it does work generally just fine for documents with only occasional need for special characters. Macros it can do just fine – you can write them yourself, just like in any other word processor. Just won’t work for writing in languages with lots of diacritics, unless you set up a new keyboard or a new template on an existing keyboard.
AFAIK the spreadsheet component is fine and has always been fine – scatterplot, calculate trendline, etc. FWIW I think the new version is called Libre OO, so maybe they fixed the lack of CTL-key customization for inserting “special” characters. I don’t know.
Y-hat=cheers.
ETA to amplify: more than two key-combinations of my choice to insert common “special” characters renders the package unusable for me. As I say, maybe they’ve fixed the problem without the use of macros (which IME screw up the typeface and even font in addition to being cumbersome and slow).
Docs requires internet access. This isn’t a problem until you’re in a hotel with no access, or the network is down. It also gives Google access to your documents. The advantages are that you can access and edit documents from any computer, and the “you” can be plural: no need to send the latest updated version to the rest of your team. Also, some features which are built-in in OOO (such as a save-to-pdf with a bunch of options) are not directly available in Docs. I use OOO to generate my invoices (pdf which can be printed but not edited), Docs to store some excel spreadsheets which I share with relatives.
Jaledin, I can see how that need for special characters would be a problem, but how well does that work with Google Docs? (I haven’t tried it, 99% of my “special characters” needs are solved by switching keyboard language)
Note that there is SOME functionality now available offline.