OpenOffice goes its own way

ComputerWorld ^ | 28 September 2010 | Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

[ShadowAce]

[utherdoul]

Used Open Office before and I’ve never really liked it. It’s always seemed like a knockoff of word 95. Much as I hate Microsoft Word 2007 it has a cleaner interface.

[ChocChipCookie]

I was hoping to use Open Office on a netbook that didn’t have MS Office installed, but I needed to work on documents that would eventually end up as Word docs. It ended up being too much work cleaning up the Open Office doc once I copied it into Word. (I hope all that makes sense!)

[GeronL]

I tried an online course and it did not take OO documents at all, I had to buy MS Office.

[GeronL]

otherwise Wordpad was good enough for me. lol.

[ShadowAce]

It does make sense. I know what you're talking about.

My advice is to use what works for you in your situation. For most home users, I think that is OOo. The price point can't be beat, and it looks as good as MS Office does--providing you do not have to convert docs back and forth.

[The Comedian]

I'm soaking in it now.

About the best I can say would be "Could be worse".

Frowning takes 68 muscles.
Smiling takes 6.
Pulling this trigger takes 2.
I'm lazy.

[dfwgator]

About the best I can say would be "Could be worse".

"Could be raining."

[Future Snake Eater]

OpenOffice definitely lacks some basic functionality that Office has had for years. They’re close, but they’re not close enough.

However, if you’re not even in the neighborhood of being a power user, then OpenOffice is more than sufficient.

[The Comedian]

"Abi...somebody"

Frowning takes 68 muscles.
Smiling takes 6.
Pulling this trigger takes 2.
I'm lazy.

[dfwgator]

Open Office is probably fine for 80% of Word users, who only use the most basic functionality.

[McGruff]

Just shows what the Open Source Community can do it they try. Now for an Open Windows7 or maybe even a Open Apple OS (fat chance).

[disp86]

Open Office does allow saving as .doc extensions. I use it all the time and people I send docs to with windows don’t know the difference.

[Still Thinking]

Used Open Office before and I’ve never really liked it. It’s always seemed like a knockoff of word 95. Much as I hate Microsoft Word 2007 it has a cleaner interface.

I tried it and really wanted to like it. I'd say it's at about 95% of Office overall. 97% on fit and finish and a couple more percent of missing features. Unfortunately, the missing features are all ones I use frequently. Those features are kind of obscure, though, so I think a lot of people could use OO and be perfectly happy.

One really stupid, ah, feature...is that the whole suite shares one Recently Used File list. Why the hell would you want recent spreadsheets cluttering up your recent file list in your word processor, especially when you can only get the list up to 9 entries or whatever.

[Still Thinking]

.....nohhhhmal

[Still Thinking]

Frankensteeeeen, it’s Frankensteeeeeen!

[GeronL]

There were interactive documents that did not work at all with OO

[Still Thinking]

Just shows what the Open Source Community can do it they try. Now for an Open Windows7 or maybe even a Open Apple OS (fat chance).

Can't remember the name, but somebody's working on an OS clone of XP. I think they add like twelve lines of code a month or something. By the time they're done, they'll be cloning a museum artifact.

[GeronL]

lol.

Kind of reminds me of those people who are writing codes and stuff to get Commodore 64’s online and stuff.