I’ve been using OpenOffice.org for a while now and am fairly happy with it. Some of my friends, though, have had some problems with it, so we’re looking for a new rival to MS Office. Out of all the open source or free office suites, what’s your favorite and why?
Not quite what you asked, but I used OpenOffice for a while and found it to be inferior to MS Office (it was annoying to use and some intuitive features Excel had didn’t exist in OO’s spreadsheet). I also tried Apple’s iWork for my Mac and also found it to be inferior. I now have MS Office for Mac on my MacBook. More expensive, but worth it.
There are some things that Microsoft just does better. It’s rare, but it happens.
I tried openoffice but I found it rather clunky. I switched to google apps and have been pretty happy with it. If you need something for offline use, try LibreOffice:
How different from OpenOffice.org is LibreOffice?
Oh, I forgot to mention, my friends are definitely not looking for any pay-for programs from MS.
Aren’t the newest versions of IBM Lotus free? I like OpenOffice, but I remember that was all the rage back in the day!
LibreOffice is a fork of openoffice - there was some kind of fight when Oracle bought out Sun and pushed some of the open source people off the OpenOffice team. So basically if you were using OpenOffice because you were supporting open source, non-encumbered licensing, etc you should switch to LibreOffice.
Google Apps.
Zohois also pretty good
There’s a free, web-based version of Microsoft Office. (I think it’s meant to compete with OpenOffice and Google Docs.)