Free Office Software

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

Following on from the IE7 thread - has anyone used Openoffice?

Its an open source office suite that does everything MS Office does, except that its totally 100% free, and includes a free PDF generator.

www.openoffice.org

I'm testing it out at the moment - thinking of ditching my Office 2000. Just wondering if anyone here uses it - any major compatibility issues to worry about?

[Mirorgate 0]

I have used it before, but nothing to extensively (work places use M$ Office)

but for home use.. havent really noticed much difference, just layout and a little cosmetic things.

[w¡n9Nµ7 §£@¥€r 123]

I've been using it for 2+ years now. It's not perfect, when I save a document in MS word format and then open it on my work laptop with MS Office, some of the formatting is usually screwed up. Mostly bullet points and indentation problems.

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

I've been using it for 2+ years now. It's not perfect, when I save a document in MS word format and then open it on my work laptop with MS Office, some of the formatting is usually screwed up. Mostly bullet points and indentation problems.

I was figuring on that - and obviously you have no way of knowing how anything you attach on an email would look to someone opening it in MS Office.

[w¡n9Nµ7 §£@¥€r 123]

I've been using it for 2+ years now. It's not perfect, when I save a document in MS word format and then open it on my work laptop with MS Office, some of the formatting is usually screwed up. Mostly bullet points and indentation problems.

I was figuring on that - and obviously you have no way of knowing how anything you attach on an email would look to someone opening it in MS Office.

Right, not without doing it yourself.

[sparkofcreation 0]

I have it at work and I hate it, but that's because I mostly need to type in Spanish. MSOffice will spell-check, grammar-check, and includes a Spanish-English dictionary. By default, OpenOffice can only check English, Swahili and Italian. (No, I'm not making that up.) They (our IS staff) managed to get me a Spanish spell-checker, but it's not very good, and it doesn't check grammar or have a dictionary.

Also, in OpenOffice Calc (their Excel clone) you can't put empty cells into a formula. Like I can't write a formula of "SUM(A1:C8)" unless there are numbers in all those cells. I have to click through each one separately; it also doesn't have a sum function, instead you have to hit the + sign after every number you want added. Which is a royal pain when you're trying to add a couple hundred numbers a couple dozen times!

It's better than WordPerfect, but only marginally. I admit I do like the PDF generator and use it a lot.

Edited June 5, 2006 by sparkofcreation

[MichelleandCraig 1]

Oh, that 2nd bit...if you're used to Excel, or have to/want to use it a lot..that would be a TOTAL pain!!! M

surprised that a workplace wouldn't have regular office 2003...

Edited June 5, 2006 by MichelleandCraig

[babybunny 2]

nope! Coz, G. dubya said so