Anyone here ever used openoffice.org?

[Narse]

I just downloaded it for kicks, Its a free office program that is compatible with Microsoft and alot of others. I have alot of clients that do not like the idea of paying hundreds of dollars for Microsoft Office and was looking into other programs and I must say this one is very nice.

 

[Vadatajs]

checking it out...

 

[Narse]

Its a good program for free, one of the best freebies I have seen

 

[lowtech1]

Yes it is a nice program I have converted 3 of my coworker over to OpenOffice 1.0 and drop their Office2k, but the only draw back is the help me is quite weak & the interface isn't as intuative as MS offering.

 

[Utterman]

I have installed it on a few people's computers I have worked on. They seemed to like it (for the price of FREE) and I liked the facted it opened any office doc.

 

[lowtech1]

"ts a good program for free, one of the best freebies I have seen "

Debian, SUSE, Redhat, Apache, Mysql, Postgres, Snort and Jext are also very nice programs for free.

 

BUMP...for more opinions.

Anyone else use this suite? It seems awesome. I love the idea of an XML file format, and I also love the idea that if I want to edit Office docs, I can do that as well.

I'm downloading it right now...I'll let y'all know what I think.

 

[PrincessGuard]

I used it before. It is very good but a few things turned me away from it. It doesn't implement the MS Office formats perfectly and I encountered some strange things when trying to open an OpenOffice Word file in MS Word (e.g. formatting would be lost, spelling/grammar checker wouldn't work). The Find & Replace is far inferior to the one in MS Word.

 

[Danman]

Nope, but I am gonna download it......

 

[Draknor]

Oh yeah - I used StarOffice 5.2, and 6 beta, and now I've switched to OpenOffice. I haven't used it a lot yet, but here's my impressions:

1. Cost: FREE! (Can't beat that!)
2. Looks & acts like MS Office (much better user interface than SO 5.2 had)
3. Ability to open & save MS Office files (maintain compatibility while changing to new platform)
4. I think it can natively print to PDFs, too (?) <-- (I use Redmon & ghostscript to setup a PDF Printer on my system, so I haven't bothered with OpenOffice's version).
5. Open-Source: Much more clear what's going on with the project than MS Office
6. Size: <100megs (install file) vs MS Office's, what, 6 CDs now?

Over all, I'm very impressed - it's a free product that has all of the functionality of MS Office (to my knowledge), and the nice interface, without the bloatware, delayed updates/bug-fixes, and expensive licensing.

I'm actually curious to know if anyone has found something MS Office is actually better at than OpenOffice?

Edit: Now that PrincessGuard mentioned it, I did have some issues converting MS Office documents to SO 6 beta & back... so it's not perfect yet. I haven't used the find..replace feature, so I can't comment on that.

 

[arcain]

Draknor:

It relies on Ghostscript to convert to PDF (basically the same thing you're doing). There is no inherent "Save As" PDF support.

 

[randomlinh]

very good for the cost. as long as you don't do anything too fancy schmancy, it'll work w/ openning files and whatnot. It actually is a bit more of a memory hog than microsoft.. but I'm not complaining too much, it is *free* afterall. excellent job by the programmers i must say. SO 5.2 interface was just no good so i never used it.

Linh

 

[lowtech1]

It even open MS Office 2000 Excel files with Macros that MS Office 97 can't.

Another big Yes++ for Openoffice.

 

[Skyclad1uhm1]

Of course not! It's like "freewarez" right? Microsoft told me that everytime I use freewarez, God kills a kitten!!!

 

[manly]

If you have a price-match credit card, you could get StarOffice 6.0 for $49.99 - $20 MIR from Amazon.com, final shipped cost.

Okay, you have to pay $65 up front to Amazon but your credit card will PM down to Microcenter's ad at $49.99, cutting you a check for the difference.

A professional, retail boxed, officially supported, cross-platform office suite for $30? That's a steal.