hi, just out of curiosity is anyone using OpenOffice? is it time to ditch microsoft office?
I’ve been using Sun’s version (StarOffice) for about a year now (got it free for attending a press conference) and can’t complain at all. It’s basically Office with different buttons.
I don’t see any reason to spend the hundreds of $ on Office when you can get a great working version for free. Especially if you’re only doing presentations, documents, and spreadsheets…
I think it is a pretty good suite of software, not as polished as MS Office though, many minor workflow issues. I would not uninstall MS Office to Use Open Office but it is a viable solution if $ is an issue.
I’ve installed and been running OpenOffice.org for a while. I’d like to get it pushed into the rest of the office to cut down on the cost of buying MS Office.
It’s getting to be a very robust product. Certain formatting things I’ve found actually work better in OO.o than in MSOffice. It is also pretty good about being able to open MSOffice files. The only downside I’ve seen (assuming you aren’t doing reaaaaally complex scripting and macros in MS Office) is that formatting in an MS document might not be 100% precisely the same when brought into OO.o. But remember, you can’t even get consistent formatting in MSWord between two different computers and printers on the same version of MSWord.
So, in short, try it out, see if it works for you. If you don’t like it, you can always save your stuff in MS format and bring it back to MSOffice.
Download and use it completely free from:
cool, that’s what i pretty much thought. have you been using 2.0 Dynedain?
I’d been mostly using 1.1. Been following it for quite some time. I installed 2.0 just before I reformatted my machine (unrelated) so I haven’t had a chance to play with it and see the differences yet.
It completely replaced office for me. It reads most office files and has PDF support.
Better than Office in MHO
The only thing that I dislike about OpenOffice is there isn’t a replacement for Outlook (not Outlook Express). Does anyone even know of a program that handles email and scheduling like Outlook? I’ve looked briefly but haven’t had any success.
Integrated email and scheduling + groupware support - there is only lotus notes.
If you don’t mind seperate apps, I’ve been very happy with thunderbird for email and sunbird (also from the mozilla project) for scheduling.
for us light users of ‘office’ theres not much difference between the two, for someone who actually needs training to use ms office there might be issues in transition. but not too many of them make it this far even 
heavy excel/macro use is the only thing i’d say wouldn’t swing in a transition
Thunderbird looks good!
Time to switch I think.
Think I might give open office a go too
would be interested to hear from anyone using thunderbird. i seem to remember using it a few years ago, not sure why i’m not anymore…
I use thunderbird and I love it. Spam filtering is much better than Outlook. You may have given up on it because it was a beta product when you used it, and somwhere around 0.6b to 0.7b there was a change in the mailbox format that caused problems for a lot of people. Now its a nice stable product. I love it.
i will be changing over today!
only have an old version of outlook and its crap
I have heard lots of good things about Thunderbird.
But I do like my Outlook, mind you I wouldnt touch any version of outlook before 2003. Geezus the others were AWEFULL
Might give thunderbird a shot…
thanks daforce im using 2000 outlook
Yeah it depends on what version of 2000, there were for some reason.
I think 2003 is alot better, seems more usable, but then again if its not easy to get your hands on a copy of outlook 2003 then i would say thunderbird is definitly worth a shot.
Ive been using open office for a couple years and for basic letters and the like, its more than adaquate…
Im also using outlook 2002 and looking for something different…
-dave
I used Openoffice on OSX - I found some batch scripting tools that I couldn’t find anywhere else for MS Office. Other than that - I haven’t found any other reason to use it as it still seems somewhat limited.