Does Open Office really work?
Are there any other contenders?
Is it safe to download these or do they come with malware/spyware/adware?
The linked article below seems like a good starting place but I wanted to hear from people that have made the switch or tried to.
I use LibreOffice which is an off-shoot of OpenOffice. Either one should work. How well they work depends on what you need to do. I use them for simple editing of Word documents and spreadsheets and I have no problems. I occasionally get a more complex document from someone else that was created in MS Word/Excel and it won’t display correctly in LibreOffice. Otherwise LO reads MS documents just fine.
So if you’re doing basic editing then LO/OO are good. If you’re doing more complex work and your business relies on them you might want to pay for MS.
I wouldn’t use Microsoft on a bet, but for those who do those others named will all produce excellent documents — and if downloaded from the maker’s sites are wholly free of malware.
OpenOffice and LibreOffice will also open old Word Docs that modern Word suites won’t. The main difference is if you have Word macros you rely on, or if you prefer the Ribbon or various cases where fervent Word lovers say no other software will do. For people who want just to write and not spend 70% of the time getting the screen exactly to their liking, any office suite will do.
From yesterday:
‘Utterly unusable’ MS Word dumped by SciFi author Charles Stross
Free Cat pic included.
The OpenOffice codebase split in to two projects - Apache Open Office and LibreOffice. LibreOffice updates more often and, in my understanding of code licensing is in a better position (Libre can incorporate the OpenOffice code but not the other way due to source code licenses used.)
I used OpenOffice until the split and then LibreOffice. Both are amazingly functional and compatible. The interface to do things is differently. I’ve run into occasional small formatting issues with MS Office. If you aren’t really pushing the feature sets it’s amazingly compatible. It was rare that I ran in to issues and it usually involved someone trying to wow with flashy formatting stuff not useful stuff.
I tend to use the bookmarks in Word often, but that has been around since Word 2000. That would probably be the only non-typical feature of word that I use and even Word seems to have issues with it at times.
For excel do the free spreadsheets do the grouping function?
MS Excel is a decent program while MS Word is not. So it’s not surprising that LibreOffice Writer compares favorably while Calc does not.
For word processing at various times I use Textpad (a text editor), PolyEdit (good and lightweight for jotting notes in .rtf format), LibreOffice Writer and oh yeah Word 2007.
I’ve been using the OO suite for many years and the only problem I’ve ever had is when I email something to someone but forget to save it as a ‘regular’ office file first and get an email back saying they can’t open it.
I’ve got it on all the computers at work (4) and the boss will, from time to time, say ‘can’t we just put Office on here?’. Telling him how much it would cost to put Office on 4 computers just so that we’d have Excel and Word usually stifles him long enough that he’ll go back to just hitting the Save As .Docx file button before emailing something.
I’ve been using the Office Suite WPS by Kingsoft for years. It has handled all MS docs I’ve opened without any problems. And it’s FREE. 
I’m no big MS fan, but imho, LibreCalc is basically worthless compared to Excel. The text editors are mainly comparable, but even then, I still prefer Word.
I don’t understand why there isn’t any decent competition to MS in this arena.
I basically agree.
LibreCalc isn’t worthless compared to Excel, but Excel is clearly the better program especially if you start getting into complex spreadsheets. I suspect one could make complex LibreCalc sprdshts as well, but I don’t know anyone who has.
OO Word is quite capable of handling MS Word. There will be some minor formatting issues, but 95% of the time you will be fine.
I recommend having an old copy of Word on one computer, so that if there is some issue that matters, you can always fix it/work around it.
Yeah, $33/month is out of reach for most businesses.
IMO, it’s the kind of niche MS does well at: Desktop application, with lots of features, where GUI “polish” is key, and there are great benefits to having everyone in the organization on the same platform. These are things that open-source projects are really bad at.
OpenOffice works fine for normal text documents unless you’re using footnotes or endnotes. In that case, you are fucked, because the formatting will never come out right if you try to open the document in Word (or try to open a document that was created in Word.) It’s even worse with documents in the various WordPerfect formats.
You can setup OO to save as a Microsoft format as the default.
I have OO on my computers at home, and am using the spreadsheet, word processor, database and drawing programs. They all seem to work very well. Now, there are occasional formatting issues going back to native Word, but my needs aren’t that complex, and I don’t generally need to send word docs out, so it hasn’t been a major issue. I can always put it in a .pdf if I need the formatting to be locked.
You might want to consider Google Docs. I’m not sure of the Word/Excel compatibility right off hand.
From my personal experience:
[ul]
[li]LibreOffice is quite good for simple documents, definitely worth trying out. But it doesn’t handle more advanced features well. I find that older business documents were quite fond of WordArt, which is not supported.[/li][li]Apache OpenOffice has no advantage over LibreOffice.[/li][li]Google Docs and Office Online are both excellent for simple and collaborative work. Office works very well with any offline software, google docs does not.[/li][/ul]
I have had formatting issues with LO and OO with native MS Word files. However, if you create the document from scratch in LO/OO and then do any further edits in MS Word, and then go back to LO/OO you will be fine.
I also save anything from LO/OO in the open format, as soon as you use the MS proprietary formats MS Word starts injecting meta data or something in the XML construct that screws with the formatting if you edit in LO/OO. Especially if you use templates and put text into the headers/footers. It can be a bear to fix. Just stay in the open format and you should be OK no matter what you do.
But, only Excel is like Excel. The other spreadsheet programs are only OK for simple spreadsheets or calculations on just the one sheet. As soon as you start linking books or sheets Excel is the only way to go.
I can tell you first-hand that LibreOffice sucks on a Mac (I haven’t tried it on a Windows computer), and LibreCalc is absolutely worthless.
I haven’t had any issues with OpenOffice.
That stated, I have very few problems with MS Office. Yeah, it is bloated and could be more intuitive, but all these other productivity suites are just imitations of MS Office and some are quite weak.
In my experience, Google Docs is good for simple documents without complex formatting.
Google Sheets is good for simple spreadsheet content; linking complex formulas across multiple spreadsheets can be problematic.
LibreOffice is a fail for me. It couldn’t handle columns with tables and bookmarks. I know bookmarks are a little odd but columns with tables is pretty basic. The spreadsheet is worthless. I might try open office next.