Well the pro's are:
1) it's free (with out doubt the biggest pro) so are the dicionairies.
2) It can create PDF files without additional software installed (and
without ads)
3) Cross platform (can be usefull)
The con's however:
1) though they have tried to be as much MSOffice compatible, there are
still some flaws. Therfore it is not that interesting if you're
planning for cross company use, since most other companies rely
compleetly on Microsoft Office compatability
One thing to keep in mind in that MS Office is a closed format. To me
this means there will almost always be incompatabilities. If this is a
problem, then you buy the expensive MS Office.
I have transferred a few simple documents back and forth between school
(which had MS Office installed) and home (OpenOffice) and had a few
problems, but nothing insurmountable. Since I saved myself several
hundred dollars, I could live with it.
2) it is a slow starter. If you thought office was slow to start, Open
office is abour 30% slower to start. Once loaded, ther is not too much
difference in speed
This will vary greatly depending on each persons computer. I can start a
new OpenOffice word document from scratch in less than 2 seconds. I
don't have the OpenOffice Quickstarter running either. I have a system
with 512MB of memory and an AMD 1.4 GHZ processor.
Something else to keep in mind in that I believe MS Office preloads a
bunch of its programs or libraries into memory on startup of the system.
I don't know if this can be turned off like the Quickstarter in
OpenOffice can or not.
My wife has a work laptop with MS Office 2000 I believe and it takes
between 2-3 seconds to get a new word document displayed
3) it lacks a real database interface. It does have a database engine,
but it comes not even close to MS Access (to be honest, untill now
there isn't a real freeware MS Access replacement)
In my opinion, I don't believe there will be a MS Access clone built into
OpenOffice. The OpenOffice software has some dBase support built in.
For information on creating a flatfile database with a form, this is
agreat web site for those who have not seen it:
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/garryknight/linux/oodbase.html
The OpenOffice software can be used as a front end to other databases. I
have used it to connect to both MySQL and PostgreSQL. I have also used
it to connect to a database created by MS Access.
4) The macros language is javascript (it is somewhat harder to master
as the Visual Basic script LANGUAGE in MS Office)
I am not sure about OpenOffice using javascript as its macro language.
From within the OpenOffice help system, it talks about OpenOffice.org
Basic and there is a section titled "Programming with OpenOffice.org
Basic".
In Recap:
Open Office is without doubt the closest there is to the MS-Office
solution there is.
If you don't use macro's and have no need for a database solution (or
use an other application like windbf
<
http://www.buchenwald.de/software/windbf-e.html>), Open Office will
just work for you.
Something else to add is that there are no time limits, ads, crippled
modules, etc. It is a large program to download, especically over the
phone lines, but there are ways around this for only a few dollars.
For those that want a boxed application, there is the Sun branded product
which I have seen for sale that includes some extra stuff.
For me, OpenOffice is a great program. I have very simple needs though.
I mainly include just tables and graphics in my documents. Not much
else.
I have only ever had one document go bad on me. I had one native
document that OpenOffice would not open. I tried many times and it would
not work. I finally rebooted my system, tried again, and it worked.
This was on a Windows system.
I use the Text program probably 55-60% of the time. I use the
Spreadsheet about 30% of the time. The rest I use in the Drawing
program, which I am liking more and more. The only time I have used the
Presentation module is to view Power Point presentations. I have not
created any presentations from scratch
