OpenOffice

[Boonierat]

http://www.openoffice.org/

Anyone tried this free version of Office? any good?

[Archamus]

I used it before figuring out that the trial version of Microsoft Office would last me through the school year

Everything in it seems based off excel, like making a powerpoint in excel. Also, it's missing alot of the formatting stuff word has, which is both a blessing and a curse. You don't need to spend an hour wrestling with word to get a word in the right place, but you also have to do numbering etc. yourself. IMHO microsoft office is a more finished and polished project, but it's also more expensive

[scuud]

Yes, I use it. I'm not willing to pay for Office and it's better than wordpad, so I'm good.

[Overseer]

I used it a couple of years ago for making diagrams, the whatever its called that does diagrams works really well. I never used it for word processing or spreadsheet work because I knew and had the Microsoft equivalents.

[sickpup]

I used it back in the day (back when it initially came out). It was fine then, and I would imagine it has only gotten better over the years. Certainly worth checking out if you don't wanna dump money into the software.

[gobeavs]

I use it exclusively (it works for linux also, yay) and I find it works very well. It has compatibility with Office doccuments, so I don't see any reason to use Word.....version 2.0 is due out pretty soon, which has plenty of new features and improvements, so you might wait for that if you can.

[nemo]

I dumped my MS Office licence on my work laptop ages ago and use only and extensively the Beta OpenOffice.org 2.0 after having worked with the 1.14 version. Works just fine, produces documents that are two to three times lighter than their MS counterparts, makes PDFs on the fly, documents are immediately readable on Linux workstations.

Besides, it's open source and the local programmer here knows he can have total control over its features and functions if need be.

[Dicke Bertha]

How does it handle word and excel docs of the office package? Can you edit and send back stuff to MSoffice users carefree? I hate the MS even Adobe people, always trouble, as you reformat they treat you like a criminal. And even if they don't I don't care much for validating my expensive Adobe v 7 twenty times. (No joke, and the best answer help desk gave was for me to make an index file of my entire HD sofware and send them - and that in a format thst my computer didn't understand - no thanks)

[Boonierat]

As far as I understand it the documents are 100% compatible with MS Office.

[nemo]

Let's say 99% compatible. Depending on the MS Office version used to open the files, you might end up losing some complex formatting when converting from .odt (open document text) to .doc files.

But that's a non-issue for most work-related documents (memos and notes with tables, lists, numbers and bullets etc.)