Open Office

Karahd's gag post got me thinking about Open Office again which is something I have been wanting to try out for a LONG time.

Does anyone here use it?

What is your review of the product?

I really find myself despising MS Office more and more as the years go by. I think it was quite good right around Office 97, but since then they just add more and more garbage that hurts the product more than it helps.

I hate autocomplete and autocorrect and auto anything really. It seems like no matter how many different places you disable it in MS Office, there is always one more lurking somewhere just waiting to tell you how you want to format your work.

Does Open Office have a word processor and spreadsheet program that are both relatively equal to Word and Excel in functionality?

What else does it have?

What are its main pros?

What are its main cons?

I do not use this or Linux, but some of my friends do.

What I can answer is, yes it includes programs similar to Word and Excel - Writer and Calc. The functionality is nearly as good for Calc, and it is being improved on all the time.

A review I was sent is http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1571626,00.asp

It contains a pros and cons on one of the pages, but I would have preferred it to be much more in depth.

I'm not at the point where I'm going to go out and install Linux, but it might be worth a try.


Sorry I can't write up a personal review.

Open Office definitely has a lot of functionality where it is capable of doing a majority of what MS Office does. The trouble comes with, it does do it differently. So there is a bit of a learning curve (not majorly steep).

If you want something, simple, easy, and provides a good amount of the functionality of just word/excel, and is free (for 30 days). I would recommend

PC Suite

www.software602.com

It is the word/excel program I install when I build computers for other people. It looks/works A LOT like a stripped down version of MS Office. Although in my opinion it keeps the useful features (namely spelling/grammar check).

Licensing
This product used to be free for home use totally. They've upped it a bit and made it more of a trial product. It's still fairly cheap at $30 for a licence though if you like it.


602 Text (Their word processor)
602Text internally uses the MS Word DOC format (9x/2000/XP) and it can also open RTF, TXT and HTML files. Documents can be easily exchanged with MS Word, 602PC SUITE or any other word processor that supports these standard document formats. Documents can be enhanced with pictures, sounds, text frames, Magic Text, custom styles or multiple columns. Correct misspelled words using the included spelling checker (English US/UK, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese) and create concise, professional documents with the thesaurus (English US/UK German). Use the text-to-speech function to read any document aloud. Insert one of 14 supported bar codes into a document or print a label sheet with multiple bar codes to organize inventory or company assets. Use this powerful word processor for any document task!

602 Tab (Their spreadsheet)
602Tab is a MS Excel compatible spreadsheet with over 150 available functions. This user-friendly application will open any standard Excel XLS (9x, 2000, XP) spreadsheet and save it in XLS (95) format. DBF and CSV format support is included. ODBC access allows direct access to any ODBC compliant database. Setup complex automated business forms or analyze active data from a database and limit results based on sorting rules and AutoFilters. Present your data instantly with the Graph Wizard in twelve different 3D and 2D graph types. Add stunning effects to your 602Tab spreadsheet using AutoFormat. Pick one of the twelve pre-defined styles and combine them with your own style to create a perfect look of your spreadsheet. Use advanced features like group and outline to compute and organize the final results in your spreadsheets. Enhance your spreadsheets with pictures, charts, sounds, magic text, any OLE objects and much more. Even a beginner can quickly create and present data in a professional manner with 602Tab!

OpenOffice can read/write MS Office files. I've used it, but then I don't really have much use for Office. I only use Word/Writer when I have to send something to someone. As far as I'm concerned they both do their job very well.

Also worth mentioning, I guess, is the fact that OpenOffice has binaries for both Windows and Linux. But you will find it much slower than MS Office.

the slowness that i refer to is the load-time. it's better than it used to be, when it was that when you opened openoffice, you loaded the entire suite with its own desktop, etc. (back when it was staroffice that you downloaded and not openoffice). it has its own font system as well.

I've used AbiWord on my Linux machine and it has a look and feel just like Word, but usually if I'm typing something on that machine it's nothing more than just plain text so Gedit works good enough.

Also, Gnumeric comes in the same Office package as AbiWord. It's similar to Excel in look, but I have not used it much to say if it's equal to Excel in functionality. All the basics are there though.

I have KWord, KSpread and KPresent - appear to be similar to Word, Excel and Powerpoint, but I can't execute any of them (can't figure out why either).

Here are screenshots of the two applications in my Office group that I CAN use, but I'm not sure if they are the same applications in the Open Office package. Probably real similar I guess.

AbiWord

Gnumeric

Lets keep this thread confined to Open Office (the thread title).

A new thread for general open source office suites or Microsoft alternatives would be fine, but lets keep this one confined to the title.

I'm most interested in Open Office because it is (I believe) completely open source and runs on multiple operating systems.

That makes it potentially a cross platform solution that if widely adopted could become the de facto standard.

Having an open source standard rather than having Microsoft controlling what productivity software looks like would be most excellent.

i would be entirely surprised if OpenOffice became any sort of standard or de facto office suite. it's not new at all. It's what StarOffice was before it became a commercial product. so as a product it's been around for several years.

it's big, it's burly and not nearly as pretty as its competition.

it takes a long time to load itself into memory, in either windows or linux. i'm not entirely certain how i feel about its internalized font system (anybody remember wordperfect?).

but! it works, and it works well. you can view/edit/save docs that are compatible with its competition. how WELL those exports work....i'm not sure.

i say give it a shot, no harm no foul.

I use Open Office on Windows XP and Linux. Load time is fine (what.. you need to write an emergency memo immediately? geez). It imports word docs no problem. I send out resumes in .doc format and it works great.

The word processor basically works like word. The spreadsheet looks and seems to work like Excel. I don't use spreadsheets much though. It is a free download, plays well with Windows. It has a basic HTML editor, powerpoint like program as well.

I've had no problems with them and I have a feeling unless you use a lot of exotic features, .doc and .xls will work fine.

Vertas

What do you want to know about it?! I just did the voice work for OpenOffice Calc, Writer and Impress for an online training for each of those products.

I can tell you how to click on the ok button, or how to cut and paste, I can tell you about bookmarks and shortcuts... :D

It really has the feel and I can't see any differences in functionality in using it, at least from the training things I did.

I've also used AbiWord and Gnumeric, both were really nice to use, now this was a few years go.. But if I did linux again, definatly would use them again.