Is Oo Really Just as Good as Microsoft Office?

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Mike

A question for those who have used both:

Tell the truth.

If you could use only one,

and Bill Gates gave you a free copy of the latest Microsoft Office,

which would you use:

Open Office or Microsoft Office?
 
Mike said:
A question for those who have used both:

Tell the truth.

If you could use only one,

and Bill Gates gave you a free copy of the latest Microsoft Office,

which would you use:

Open Office or Microsoft Office?
Click to expand...

MS Office (ducks to avoid incoming tomatoes). Short summary : OO has fancier
"range of options" but in core capability I find Office products better
thought out.
My pair o' pennies. . .

M
 
Mike said:
A question for those who have used both:

Tell the truth.

If you could use only one,

and Bill Gates gave you a free copy of the latest Microsoft Office,

which would you use:

Open Office or Microsoft Office?
Click to expand...

Easy. Open Office. Why? The "latest" version of MS Office will be
out of date in a year or two. I can always download the latest OO for
free.
 
Mike scribebat:
A question for those who have used both: If you could use only one, and
Bill Gates gave you a free copy of the latest Microsoft Office, which
would you use: Open Office or Microsoft Office?
Click to expand...

In this case, MS Office, because OOo lacks a decent spell checker for
German. The one included is horrible. Otherwise, I prefer OOo.

Yet, this comparision is not correct, because Bill Gates won't give away MS
Office for free and there is no "best office program for all purposses" -
it is always a calculation of price toward functionality. If I had to buy
an office program for my daily needs, it would neither be Star Office nor
MS Office but probably either Softmaker Office or Papyrus Office. I am only
using Star Office because students get it for free.
 
Mike a utilisé son clavier pour écrire :
A question for those who have used both:
Tell the truth.
If you could use only one,
and Bill Gates gave you a free copy of the latest Microsoft Office,
which would you use:
Open Office or Microsoft Office?
Click to expand...

I had MS Office pre-installed with my last computer... I deinstalled it
and I'm now using OOo.
Cordialement,
Hervé LOTH
 
Easy. Open Office. Why? The "latest" version of MS Office will
be out of date in a year or two. I can always download the latest
OO for free.
Click to expand...

I like this answer but have to add, 'always' is a very long time.

For now and the forseeable future OO will certainly be for free. MS
Office has never been free with the exception of promotional give-
aways.

BTW. If I was given a 'free' copy of MS Office I wouldn't install it
[I have used it]. I prefer OO.o - it just has a better feel about it.
 
Mike said:
Open Office or Microsoft Office?
Click to expand...

OpenOffice.

But: there _are_ reasons to have MS Office installed too, and that's
because it's so incredibly omnipresent. You can make a radical
choice to do everything with OOo, but (at least in my case) people
*will* send you MS Office documents from time to time that OOo fails
to load correctly.

Of course, this problem isn't really caused by OOo. If everyone
worked with OOo and its own file formats, there wouldn't be a
problem, but yeah, I'm afraid that's a bit utopic.

Regards,
Wald
 
Mike said:
A question for those who have used both:
Tell the truth.
If you could use only one,
and Bill Gates gave you a free copy of the latest Microsoft Office,
which would you use:
Open Office or Microsoft Office?
Click to expand...

I'd use OpenOffice, but I admit that it would be partly out of
principle.

Actually, Office 2003 has been winding me up like clockwork,
everything it does REALLY PISSES ME OFF like popping up the Clipopard
Toolbar all over the screen, I hate the new look and feel of the menus
and the toolbars, the Style Gallery has been ruined, etc. so if I had
a choice between OpenOffice and MS Office 2000, then it would be a
close call. Office 2003? No hesitation, I'd choose OpenOffice.

I especially hate Outlook 2003, it's a bag of bollocks compared to the
rather good Outlook 2000.

Phil Hibbs.
 
A question for those who have used both:

Tell the truth.

If you could use only one,

and Bill Gates gave you a free copy of the latest Microsoft Office,

which would you use:

Open Office or Microsoft Office?
Click to expand...
MS Office. I use OpenOffice but some of the DTP stuff is inferior in
OOo - not meaning that it won't get better. Also, as with most open
source stuff, the GUI isn't the hottest.
 
Message-ID said:
A question for those who have used both:

Tell the truth.

If you could use only one,

and Bill Gates gave you a free copy of the latest Microsoft Office,

which would you use:

Open Office or Microsoft Office?
Click to expand...


I use MS Office 2002 at work and Open Office at home.

If I were offered a free legal copy of MS Office, I would still prefer
to use Open Office at home for 99% of what I do, which includes
working with MS Office files from my day job. I can only recall one
instance where Open Office didn't display a graphic correctly, so I
would keep the "free" MS Office copy as an "insurance" backup.

If I could "buy" a legal copy of MS Office for ten bucks, it wouldn't
be worth the "insurance premium."

Ron M
 
A question for those who have used both:

Tell the truth.

If you could use only one,

and Bill Gates gave you a free copy of the latest Microsoft Office,

which would you use:

Open Office or Microsoft Office?
Click to expand...

I have both, and I use OOo. My needs are probably average.

That said, the latest release of OOo is horrendous, and I refuse to use it.
It's a "snapshot" release, and will no doubt improve. I hope!

-- Bob
 
Mike said:
A question for those who have used both:

Tell the truth.
If you could use only one, ...
which would you use:
Open Office or Microsoft Office?
Click to expand...

MS Office, hands down. I tried using OO to open a 110-page Word
document (different fonts and colors, some lists, no tables or
images). I noticed that the last item in a bulletted list on the last
page was not indented. I hit <TAB> to indent it. Program froze on
me.

I tried useing OO to open a simple Excel spreadsheet : different fonts
and colors, no graphs or formulas. It looked and printed completely
different.

At that point I uninstalled it.
 
Message-ID<[email protected]>:


I use MS Office 2002 at work and Open Office at home.

If I were offered a free legal copy of MS Office, I would still prefer
to use Open Office at home for 99% of what I do....
Click to expand...

We use Office 2003 at work, and under the new licensing agreements (at
least ours), Microsoft allows employees to legally install copies at home
using the office licence. I guess they found everyone was doing it
anyway, if their organization has a lax IT policy, so Microsoft wasn't
losing any money and expanding the market share of Office products.

In any case, I installed Office 2003 at home and see no reason to use
Open Office. I had a lot of bad experiences with earlier versions of OO,
which has put me off using it. I know that it has been improved in the
last few years, so my idea of it is probably outdated. But as long as I
have to use MS Office at work, and have feree access to it at home, I
have no intention of installing both. If I lose the ability of have MS
Office for free, then I would definitely go for Open Office.

Ibn
 
Open Office or Microsoft Office?

Hi!


If it is Microsoft Office 5 or older, then I would use Open Office :-)
Office 10 for example, is really strong. And I use it for reformating
various texts like html, txt and more to fine printable documents,
which it is doing very good. Fast.

I tried to use Star Office, one time. I paid about 50 for the Box.
After all, I recognised that it can do the same like MSOffice97 (the
office standard). Just Other!
Star Office was the predecessor of OpenOffice.

Open Office. Just use it! Try it!


Best Regards,

Daniel Mandic
 
Neither. OO is too heavy and MO too expensive.
I use 602PC suite, which is free registerware for home users.

http://www.software602.com/products/pcs/
Click to expand...

I did not see anyplace where it said 602PC suite is free registerware for home users.

Every place I seen it said it was at least $39.95




*****************************************************
E-mail address altered to foil spam.
Remove spam and junk to reply via e-mail.

*****************************************************
 
Ibn said:
We use Office 2003 at work, and under the new licensing agreements (at
least ours), Microsoft allows employees to legally install copies at home
using the office licence.
Click to expand...

I remember that such deals were available way back before Office 2003.
So it's nothing new.

When I tried Open Office a year or so ago, I found it to be a somewhat
bloated affair; much slower than O2K, for example. Also OO lacks
scripting facilities, which is something that the people in my office
use a lot in their spreadsheets. OO also lacks an equivalent of MS
Access, too.

When I was looking for a less processor-intensive word processor a few
months ago, I tried out Abiword. Unfortunately, it crashed frequently,
taking recent edits away with it. Needless to say, I did not recommend
it as a replacement for Word.
 
Mike said:
A question for those who have used both:

Tell the truth.

If you could use only one,

and Bill Gates gave you a free copy of the latest Microsoft Office,

which would you use:

Open Office or Microsoft Office?
Click to expand...

If the choice was one or the other, I would use Microsoft Office. I much
prefer OpenOffice.org for text and rich-text documents, and slideshows,
but Microsoft Office has Access, and I need that.
 
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