OpenOffice
 

In a nut shell, has anyone used this? I'm buying a new pc, and need Office 2000, but to purchase it either new or through ebay, I'm looking at a pretty penny or two. I keep seeing adds on ebay for openoffice and it claims to do all that microsoft office does and more, but I'm skeptical. I know that I can download the program, but before I tried it, I wanted some opinions about the program, so any advice would greatly be appreciated! Thanks.

It's good enough to do the job. There's no Access equivalent, and some differences, but it'll do 99% of the things you need it to do.

Here's a revew from someone else:
http://pub96.ezboard.com/fyawhofrm13...icID=396.topic

I'm in Linux and use OpenOffice and it definitely does the job. I tried to open up an Excel spreadsheet I made in Office 2003 and it wouldn't load any of the numbers I had put in, so there are some things that don't mix well. That may be just because OpenOffice hadn't been updated to the newest version, I'm not sure though. In any case, it's a great suite, and the fact its free is just fantabulous.

There's a couple of missing elements that annoy me, personally. Install it, load up a couple of your more complex documents, and see if they look the same. Then try doing the same formatting tricks on a new document. This will let you know if it is good enough for you.

I was really looking forward to installing it across my office, but it woudn't work for us. I'll be happy to install the OS X one at home, once there's a legit release of it.

Thanks for your honest answers. I think I'm going to try it if nothing else and see what I can do with it.

OO.o is a pretty good office suite. I havent used it extensively, but what I have used, I have been impressed with.

Thumbs up. Most of us use only the most basic features of a word processor. Even if you need some of the more advanced features, OO will do. I'd download it and give it a shot. If you hate it, go to plan 'b'.

I agree with redlemon - for purely technical documents that require heavy formatting, et al. OOO just won't cut it. On the other hand, if you just need something that covers MORE than just the basics of MS Office, OOO will do it and more. The problem with OOO (one of a few) is that its Office Importing filter isn't as exact as if you were to open it in another Office program. Blame it on the reason that it had to create the filter itself, and is still being de-bugged/fixed.

My biggest problem with OOO, which isn't THAT bad, is that it takes a good amount of time to load on my system. I don't have it load at system start, because it just bogs the entire system down. When I do need it, I run the quickstart. That will load it into memory, so I don't need to load the entire thing every time I close and re-open. Once you get past the initial startup, the load times are fairly respectable.

I've downloaded it and installed it on my laptop. So far I like it. It has opened everything I've done in M$ Office so far.

I'm trying to convice my boss to use it for some of our users. Believe it or not we are still using Office '97. The reason we have not upgraded is that uncle Billy wants $300 PER USER to upgrade to Office 2003.

With 650+ users that is way to much money.

for all my college needs so far its been more then good enough... ive been pleased with it so far

I use it for 99% of my documents - all truly crossplatform .sxw files of course.
The only reason I have MS word ( and nothing else from MS office) on my system is to use the much better table creation and editing.

Using it on Linux here and haven't run into any roadblocks yet.

i love openoffice. it's just as good (better, actually) than any of the windows office suites i've tried. i have office pro 2003 and don't even use it because openoffice does everything i need and is way easier to configure to exactly what you want.

I love OpenOffice :D Let me say I don't do many complicated things beyond word processing and the occasional spreadsheet, but OpenOffice has never failed me :)

I believe it. We are as well (only 25 users). i don't see any benefit that Office97 doesn't give us.

I've been using it for 2 years straight, and never had any problems with it.

It does everything I need it to and does it much better than Word ever did it.

Im never going to switch back to word.

I've used it to write my papers for school (and it has done an excellent job in that area). I don't care much about MS Office compatibility. Although...

An organization I'm part of has used Office XP in the past to write its docs. Some of them don't open/save well in OOo 1.1, unfortunately. But the documents don't really *need* the cosmetic features they use from Word XP, they would have been just fine as a standard text document.

And I think this is true for 99% of all Word documents made. Unfortunately a lot of people still save them in word format. :(

Another reason as to why I save pretty much everything in rtf (Rich Text Format). I mean, I don't insert tables. The main formating I do is Margins on the page, and the occasional font change (Times New Roman to Garamond or Arial).

Especially when I was still in college, I saved anything I made in OOO into rtf. I always had this problem with saving to .sxc (OOO format) or whatever, and taking it to school for final editing, only to be thwarted at the computer lab by MS Word and their non OOO compliance.

I use Open Office and Word alot, opening documents in Open Office sometimes, and then in Word other times. My biggest love of Open Office is that it doesn't have the squiglies under the words when I use grammer it doesn't understand. Compatibility is a bit of a problem, but only when you have tables and stuff. Most documents I make in Open Office work fine in Word and vise versa.