Open Office
 

Has anyone used Open Office, particularly in an XP environment? :confused:

I have Open Office installed, as well as Microsoft Office.

Open Office works fine. It even has some nice features, like being able to export a document as a PDF.

I've used the word processor and the spreadsheet to accomplish minor tasks from time to time. Worked fine. Haven't done a lot of complicated things like opening difficult Office documents.

Thanks Gentlemen, it seems to be working well. Of course I'm not doing anything fancy, but so far, so good. :thumb2:

I've been tempted to try it but I've gotten so used to MS Orifice that I probably would not appreciate it for what its worth.

It's amazingly familiar. I love the PPS viewer.:love:

I fucking *hate* MS Word. I use it because I have to in order to be in lockstep with the business world, but when I am working on my own terms, I use Wordperfect. I think I'm still using version 9.0 or something like that. Much more intuitive than Word, IMHO.

I'm using OpenOffice, although I primarily use it for some light word processing, and occasionally opening an excel file that relates to my volunteer position. I think OpenOffice is sweet. No problems encountered, and I have used the .pdf export. That is nice to have.

Used OpenOffice, created a basic three page document with nothing but a font specification, bolding, italics, and an indentation.

Saved it as .doc. The resulting file was 34K in size.

Opened it in Word. Made NO changes. Did not even move the cursor. Saved it as .doc. It was 54K.

WTF

For anyone seeking an alternative, stand-alone word processing application you might want to check out abiWord - a free open source app that has raked in the awards. (1)

(1)[/lowMonotoneVoiceSpeakingVerySoftlyButVeryQuickly] I reject Spam and its evil ways I am not affiliated, employed, party to any lawsuit involving abiWord, Linux, open source developers, any competitor of Microsoft including but not limited to Linus Torvalds, Google, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, the entire Seattle phone book, or the government of India. Offer not valid in Tennessee or Utah or anyone who pronounces nuclear nookular. [/lowMonotoneVoice]

Embedded personally identifying information and some other bloat.

I can help.

I used to work with Eric Sink before he started the abiWord project. It was an interesting idea - give the app away and sell the support. I think MSWord was too embedded for it to come off.

OpenOffice
 

OpenOffice does one very good thing for me. It can rescue and repair Word documents better than Office itself or any of the utilities out there which I have used.

I have used this product to repair Excel and Word documents, and recommend it for that reason alone, amongst many others. It has saved my customers' behinds more than once.

While it will choke on complex documents (I'm talking about 50+ page documents with lots of graphs and charts), unfortunately more than Office itself will, it is a worthy alternative. It doesn't have all the bells and whistles of Office, but it does have enough for your average user.

Considering that Microsoft themselves has issues reading Word documents between versions, esp. if you use a newer version to create a document, and open it in Office 97 or 2000, OpenOffice isn't that bad of a deal.

I've run it on Linux/PPC (Ubuntu and Debian Unstable) and Windows with no loss of functionality. OS X, unfortunately, isn't supported, and I had to get Office 2004 for my Mac.

Thanks,

Mitch

I thought OpenOffice would run on Mac if you installed an X implementation like OroborusX or some such? I know my dad had it on his.

OpenOffice is supported if you run XWindows.

However, the performance leaves much to be desired, and it's not a native application.

In other words, it looks pretty bad.

Mitch