OSS equivalent to Microsoft Word

[calyco]

Is Openoffice or Abiword better? I would prefer that the formatting of text look exactly the same in Word because I have resumes and other important stuff that I created, 99% of the time the other party will be viewing my documents through Word.

 

[Crusty]

Everytime I've had to submit a resume it was done as either a .txt file or .pdf....

as for the question, I definitely think that OpenOffice is better

 

[spherrod]

in my experience, OpenOffice

 

[drag]

*.doc format sucks, but it's what people use, so you and I get stuck with it. If high quality is most important, then you use PDF.

Org is probably going to be closest, but it's slow. If you want something fast use Abiword.

Install both. Use what you like, and double check how well it looks in the other program and if you have access to somebody with a copy of MS Office, check it in that, too.

That way you know whatever the person uses at the other end, then it will look ok.

 

[kamper]

I ususally use OOo for this sort of thing, but you definitely have to double check how it looks with MS Word before sending it out.

 

[Sunner]

One nice feature about OOo is that it does PDF export out of the box.
It's slow as hell though.

 

[Malak]

It's slow? I've never experienced any word processor being slow

 

[drag]

Org is not slow while your using it. It's only slow to open up... It's got java bits and stuff like that.

It's pretty nice otherwise.


Plus it's not just a word proccessor, it's the full office suite. Spreadsheet, powerpoint-thingy, and so on and so forth. Everything that MS Office does. It's designed to be a replacement for MS Office and has a UI that is specificly designed to be familar to MS Office users.

The one thing that it does better then MS Office right now is that is has a decent HTML editor, the MS Office one is apsolutely horrid.

The next-gen version of it, currently in beta, even has a passable Database application. There was one 'hidden' in the 1.x series, the current series, but it realy sucked. One advantage over Access is that the new 2.x beta contains a *real* SQL database, unlike the propriatory thing that MS uses that has sql-like aspects. The horrid part is that it's written in Java. It'll have probably end up having drivers for all commonly used free-software dbs probably, mysql, postgresql, interbase/firebird, etc. etc. though.

If your curious it's hsqldb

 

[Netopia]

Two things....

The new MS-Access like program (Base) is nice, but I'm hoping that the final version is better than the Beta... which only opens databases of 64 thousand rows.

The other thing... has anyone ever used the "Math" program? I've only looked at it for a moment... is it supposed to be a Mathematica sort of thing or just something that allows you to build formulas (for viewing) and then copy them into other programs for inclusion in documents?

Joe

 

[kamper]

Originally posted by: drag
The next-gen version of it, currently in beta, even has a passable Database application. There was one 'hidden' in the 1.x series, the current series, but it realy sucked. One advantage over Access is that the new 2.x beta contains a *real* SQL database, unlike the propriatory thing that MS uses that has sql-like aspects. The horrid part is that it's written in Java. It'll have probably end up having drivers for all commonly used free-software dbs probably, mysql, postgresql, interbase/firebird, etc. etc. though.

I don't think it's so horrible that it's written in java but that's just mho

The nice thing about it being in java is that support for any database is as simple as dropping in the appropriate jdbc driver and supplying a connection url. That means that OOo folks don't have to do (much) database specific work in order to support specific ones. It won't matter if the database is free either, as long as there's a decent driver (which shouldn't be a problem for most mainstream dbs) you can use it.

Sorry for the off topic jump though unless you were planning to embed something database driven in your resume

 

[sturla]

Org writer opens in 7 sec on my computer, with Ubuntu amd64 installed. The second time around it's much faster. About 2-3 sec. That's due to it has already been loaded into the memory. I've got version 1.1.3 of the application. According to Org the next release is going to be faster to load into the system.

I'm not complaining at all. And what else, it's free! And it's just as good as Word. Somebody saying something else better have some good arguments.

 

[drag]

If your using Linux you have a much larger selection, and most of them work ok in Windows too...

For instance GNOME has it's own set of applications. They aren't a suite per-say.. they are all independant, but they are nice especially for lower-resource computers.

For instance gnome's default e-mail client is Evolution, which is roughly equivelent to Outlook. It can be used with a veriaty of groupware applications, including Exchange (with a add-on). Abiword is a nice word proccessor with a small footprint. There is Gnumeric, which is a nice spreadsheet program. My roomate likes to use GNUCash for managing his financial stuff...

Not realy all MS Office style stuff, but it's nice.

Then there is the KDE Office Suite, called Koffice. It includes:
karbon -- vector based drawing app
kchart -- chart drawing program
kformula -- formula editor
kivio -- flowcharting program (?)
kp[resenter --presentation program
kspread -- spreadsheet application
kuger -- a business report maker (?)
kword -- a word proccessor.

And there are quite a few others besides those.

Personally I just use OpenOffice. Sometimes I use Abiword.. and if I was a kde user I'd probably just stick with koffice.