Using OpenOffice.org?

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Franky myself i despise Microsoft Corp, so i was thinking of alternatives to M$ office, heres about the only decent one ive found.

www.openoffice.org its an open source office utility that can handle saving / loading / converting MS file types, however i've heard that this part of the program isnt 100% reliable.

None the less its a very good app, the only other alternatives are to keep formatting and using trial downloads ... or of course theres the "W" word that dare not be uttered, however if you even think about that Bill Gates will have you killed.

Sadly almost everyone uses M$ office, even the student versions will still cost you 200 quid, so i figured id just share this with the rest of you.

 

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Well I'll be honest. I love office and yes I would pay the money for it because I do like it that much specially the 2003 version.

I've heard nice things about openoffice even if it did lock my comp up tighter than a dog on a porkchop bone.

I know trip who is a mod here uses it. Even though I'm trying to convert him. But there are people that do use it and like it as well as ms office.

 

Hmm to be honest based on the ammount of work I do in office I dont see the cost as a problem, infact I find the whole 'its too expensive' crowd a bit confused, especially when there generally sitting infront of one grand of pc

I use openoffice on my linux boxes, but I also have MS Office installed at home and work, and I must say its alot more mature than OOo, we will see how version 2 performs, its looking very swish, but I cant see it, or even staroffice (which OOo is based on) toppling MS office

do you have any firm reasons for 'despising' microsoft?

 

Yup, all the crap they put into their OS (like windows messanger, which the majority of new users dont know how to get rid of), the whole "i got an idea, lets make windows servers only able to communicate with windows stuff, that'll screw over the compettion and mean we basicly have a huge MS sticker on the net" that was on the MS news page a while back, the way they rip off any idea that comes out and repack it with an MS logo (like the GUI) and all the damn stupid security exploits they leave in place (such as the port 445 stuff, and that Universal PnP crap that they left wide open for a while (thankfully most ISPs now block or close by default),or for instance the the way windows handles deleting files by just deleting the references keeping the files intact).

Mostly what pisses me off about M$ though is their prices, i agree MS office is a nice piece of software, but i dont think its worth £200 just for STUDENT edition, and since theres no real competitor to it every company has it... so it means anyone who wants to read their crap or edit it again needs Office 2003. If M$ lowered their damn prices a little maybe i wouldnt feel so hostile about it, its not like their software NEEDS those prices, Bill gates and the M$ corp arent exactly poor are they? hell if you have the pro edition Office 1997 and upgraded to 2003 it still costs you a huge wad of cash when most other places offer future upgrades for free. And let us not forget, that if you DO make something in Ms Office and read it on a computer that only has the default .doc its all screwed up hence the reason for things like .pdf existing.

OO i dont think is too bad, yeah the code aint 100% yet but its a WIP, frankly id rather use OO and donate cash to them then pay M$ outragous prices for software that should have been free with their PRO OS packages by default.

Frankly M$ and its software has spread like a disease, the new Office is going to be XML based technology i hear meaning its readable and editable in all formats, definatly XML is becoming something to learn about.

 

Well personaly I'm not really a fan of any bashing of any sort, being an OSS advocate and an avid MS product user I can safely say both sides of that fence have pros and cons, and the 'average' user would have just as many holes in an off the shelf linux distro

configuration is the problem, and whilst OSS generally has the kudos when it comes to 'locked by default' MS have come along way wth SP2, as for the whole stealing ideas, I cant quite imagine where gnome and kde got thier looks from ;)
infact most all OS have VERY similar guis, simply because youc ant just radically change it and expect the 'masses' to take it up quickly, even OSX gui is similar to windows which was similar to OS/2 which.. yeah you get the picture

and where on earth are you paying 200 quid for a student copy? think someones robbing you there mate, my student copy was under 90 quid, infact a full pro version is in the 300 area, infact after a quick google search im seeing the 2003 version for 80 - 117 quid, and student copies of xp for 60, cant really go wrong with that even as a student lol

anwyay back on topic
like i said OOo 2 looks pretty promising, still not sure if it will replace MSO2k3 though for most folks, I do make a habit of installing Ooo when building people machines, they want MSO they can go pay for it lol

 

Sad as it is to admit, MSO is a very usefull piece of kit in the modern home / office environment, if you have the cash for it then its worth buying (its just a lil pricy) as you'll get good use out of it, if you cant afford it then OO is about the only real choice there is.

I despise M$ for many reasons, however the alternatives suck =p

 

Haha your last line sums it up most accuratly
except for me not despising them and all

 

I use both. Since I do a bit of writing and the publishing industry uses MS Office, I use MS Office. I do admit that it's the office suite I'm most familiar and comfortable with.

At work, I use both since most of the engineers I have to communicate with use OpenOffice.org. Some of the applications I use only interact with MS Office so I have to work with that as well. As it is, I guess that makes me sort of "bi-lingual"; using both office suites.

What attracted me to your question the most though is that my co-author and I are currently writing a user's guide for Novell Press on the Novell Linux Desktop 9 OS. I'm in the middle of writing the OpenOffice.org section. Just finished "Draw" last night. Although Novell made their tweaks, it's still pretty much OOo 1.1.3.

While I agree with Ryan that OOo 1.1.3 needs to grow a bit, I do believe that it has a fairly complete range of features and you can open and save MS Office docs in OOo so it's not like you can't interact with the MS Office Suite crowd.

I have worked in a limited fashion with the beta for OOo 2. I hear it's gonna blow the doors off the prior versions and hopefully, give MS Office a run for its money. We'll see.

 

Don't hold your breath.

 

I get slightly confused by why people hate Microsoft so much. I can see the point that people may think they have a monopoly on the OS front but that in my opinion is not Microsoft's fault just because they have a product that everyone is familiar with and it's not Microsoft's fault they have so much of the market because the alternatives are either geared towards experts, programmers or Microsoft haters. The only think near to Windows is Linux and to newbies it's too hard to use even build's like Mandrake. Sorry a bit off topic I know.

As for Office suites I use OOo at work mainly but still have to use MS Office as OOo isn't compatible with password protected documents apart from that I think OOo is a good alternative to MS Office and will compete with MS Office in the market in the next year or two. The company I work for is semi thinking about buying it instead of the next MS Office suite due to it being a heck of a lot cheaper.

 

Just thought I would add my 2p worth!

Having used Star Offce and Open Office as well as Microsoft Office... I believe the key difference which is why Microsoft has the edge is Outlook...

Linux is still looking for a mainstream email client which will work with Exchange (Which is pretty huge in most organizations). There was a email client capable of this which was Ximian Evolution... however Novell has recently bought this along with SUSE so I should imagine it will not be free anymore. This in itself is really forcing people to stay with Outlook... (And therefore Office)

The way Microsoft has tied all its Office components together (Outlook using Word as the message editor etc) has great benefits to the user but is a nightmare if you are looking to get out of using Microsoft products...

Also a lot of people upgrade to the latest versions of Office with really no need. I know of 2 company's still running Office 97 with no problems, and loads more with Office 2K!

But hey!

 

I've got to agree with Phoenix about not being a basher of any sort.
It's OK to dislike a specific product for whatever reason, or disapprove of a certain business practice, but I guess it's a bit unfair to trash an entire organisation.
Our office is completely MS, and I've never used anything else (sorry). We had a guy apply for a job, and his CV had been created with open office. We couldn't open it (either our fault or his) so it went in the recycle bin.
Sad fact of life. Unless you're Luke Skywalker, the little guy always get stamped on (oh, or David - the one with the slingshot).

 

One of the best pieces of career advice I'd ever been given was "Don't marry an operating system".

The same can be applied for application software. The guy in question my have loved OpenOffice.org and/or not had any love for MS, but he should have known better to have sent his CV in like that. On the other hand, if he had written it in Word and your office only used Writer, you'd still have been able to open it.

Ok, I just had to stick that one in.

 

Man he clearly wasnt actually looking for a job was he?
isn't it like an industry de facto that CVs get sent in .doc format, if possible word 95 format just incase!!

even differing versions of word alter the formatting and that can make a swish CV look a complete mess, and highly unprofessional

I also send mine in as PDFs these days, it stops the annoying agencies editing it how they think it should be for the role, which often backfires

and its openable by pretty much anyone (of any OS)

 

He wasn't doing a very good job of it.
I guess we shouldn't make assumptions. The fact that we couldn't read the document was the real killer. However, the act itself of sending it was enough to concern us. It suggested someone who didn't put a lot of thought into what he was doing and how it would affect others, someone who possibly had a rebellious streak in them - all kinds of stuff.
Oh, and his address and phone number must have been in the document, so we couldn't contact him and ask for another format.

I tend to print my CV and post it. I know quite a few bosses who can't open email attachments and lose anything that they can't put a paperweight on.

 

Open Office holds a fear for many users simply because it is not Word and Excel. The equivalent of being scared of driving a different car because the indicators are in a slightly different position. Despite the fact that 99% of all admin work can be done using 10 year old or older software companies feel a need to have the latest programs. Normally this is initiated by hopeless high level managers. Enough of the dissing. My main point is that the 2 big office products Excel and Word are simply overkill for everyday work. OO is okay and good alternative which covers the basics, it covers enough. One little anecdote. About 4 years ago I applied for a support vacancy for a local firm which explained that they had managed to cut IT staff from 20 down to 3 within 2 years after switching to Open Source software in the main, with people switching from Word to the OO equivalent with little trouble. Moral of the story people can adapt to using 'unusual' software

 

you will find if you rename the desktop icon for Calc and Writer to Excel and Word most users wont even notice the difference

especially users who are not too computer savvy

 

Then they would suddenly discover that they can create a pdf document in "Word"

 

well if you had Acrobat installed you get the same icon in word
just doesnt cost 400 bucks in OpenOffice

 

I hadn't seen this thread before. I guess I don't go dig through the archives enough....

I'm someone who doesn't like MS, but it's not because they have been making buggy OS's for years, or have been enabling unneccessary services by default, or have incorporated things like ActiveX into the IE so malware/spammers/virus writers can automagically mess with your system through a piece of software that should never have been made an integral part of the OS.

I dislike them because of the way they do business, for their lack of ethics, they way they stomp on the little guy even though they have more money than they know what to do with. I mean, the way I see it, IE is incorporated into the OS simply because they wanted to crush Netscape and incorporating IE into the OS was they only way they could give away IE and crush their business opponent. Computer users have been paying the price for their way of doing business ever since. They couldn't compete heads up so they found a dishonest way to crush Netscape without really caring about the consequences to their own OS and all the people who buy their OS.

I also dislike the way they are beginning to use open source software to improve their systems and all the while running a campaign in the legal arena trying to crush open source through the usage of patenting everything they can think of. I very much dislike the hypocrisy of such actions, and as a result I think very little of MS. They are down at the bottom of the ethical pool with lawyers.