Open Office questions ...

[chewbaccapits]

Is it just as good as MS word? I've never used it and its been an interest as of late...What do you guys and gals think about? What does it lack? And do you ever see it a as permanent replacement of MS word?


I only use MS word for, what else, word processing...Some labels usage and lite script work.

 

[LimeLite]

Re: Open Office questions ...

Well, it's free, so try it out. You need X11 to run it currently, but as soon as version 2.0 comes out there'll be an OS X native version. It's pretty damn good. Most people don't realize that they don't need to pay hundreds of dollars for an office suite.

 

[stcanard]

Re: Open Office questions ...

I would say it's 98% of Word. The problem is if you use that extra 2% (most don't).

It's not great with styles. Although I'm not sure how it handles styles created within OOo.

If you're writing letters and 10 page essays, it's excellent.

If you're doing documents with complicated tables and formatting that you're sharing revision marked versions with other people, starts to show it's shortcomings.

But, again, for 99% it's all you'll ever need. Download it and try it for a week. All it costs is bandwidth.

 

[cubist]

With Panther do we still need to explicitly launch X11?

 

[stcanard]

Originally posted by cubist
With Panther do we still need to explicitly launch X11?

I'm not sure, because with Jaguar I didn't; it automatically launched X11 for me.

Until I get the panther upgrade (tomorrow hopefully, I only ordered on Oct 8th) I can't really say!

 

[jonapete2001]

i run Open office on my windows machine and i for do not think it has any where near the functionality of MS office. It seems buggy to me and it always messes up my page formatting. This is compared to office for windows, office for mac is supposed to better than it mac brother. Unless open office for mac is leaps and bounds ahead of its windows counter part i suggest just shelling out and getting oFFIce v.x for mac.

 

[stcanard]

Originally posted by jonapete2001
It seems buggy to me and it always messes up my page formatting.

Is this on native OOo documents, or on the conversion between word and OOo?

I find on documents created itself, it's alright, as long as you're not trying to get enterprise quality documents (i.e, letters and essays work fine).

If you're trying to convert from MS Office documents it's definitely a read-only quality.

 

[tduality]

I'm using Open Office at work on Windows for more than a year now. Since OOo 1.1.0 I use it about 95% of the time. Only when I have to send a document and must be sure that the formatting is perfect for the receiver also I use MS Word.

We'll make Open Office the standard office tool in our company and will keep just one copy of MS Office when we have to upgrade to XP. I'm sure Open Office is here to stay.

Is it better than MS Office? I don't know. What I know is that it is as ugly and unintuitive as MS Office. Do I miss functionality? No.

Open Office on Mac OS X / X11 is very important for me and it works well even on my 400 Mhz machine. I'm really looking forward for the Aqua version of it. For sure it's not and will never be a 'Mac Application'. And I hope Apple will come up some day with a word processor that is intuitive, elegant and easy to use. Till then Open Office is the way to go for me.

 

[tomf87]

Use vi.

 

[chewbaccapits]

Thanks peeps....will try it out...