OpenOffice?

[Epical]

No results on the search, soooooo... does anyone use OpenOffice over MS Office? I already have MS Office Professional and stuff, but there are some features in OO that seem to be pretty handy. Is it all it's cracked up to be?

For the people who don't know: .

[pirahna1]

You sir, have just saved me the price of MS Office 07. Thank you, and thank Open Source for such greatness.

edit: Can't help ya with your questions tho, sorry!

[Devek]

Open Office is amazing.

[Demosthenes]

I use open office. It's the only thing I use. I do miss grammar checking that word had though.

[souleman]

The only time I use MS Office is for Access (only because some people still use that crap). Otherwise, everything is done in OO. I have run into a few spreadsheats with hidden cells that only work properly in MS office.

The fun part is, if you get a spredsheet that is password locked so you can't make changes to certain cells, and open it in OO, then save it.. the locking is gone.

[SephYuyX]

Ive used MSOffice since forever, and after trying OO I felt good about uninstalling it and never using OO again.

[Zigma]

I use open office, mainly the writer. It's almost the same exact thing as word, and it's free, not that I'd have to pay for office but OO is just "there".

[Isiolia]

I use OO at home, no reason to pay for or pirate MS Office with it around.

[Raylinn]

Used it about 2 years back, got memory errors, was turned off and headed back to the copy of ms office I had gotten for free anyway.

[SassiAsura]

I have a certain dislike for xml... seeing as OO uses that mostly for it's native files I got a tad ticked off and went back to the Office I had gotten at school. Nowadays though I am considering installing it on the new PC I'm going to build and simply purchasing Access 2007 on the side.

[evilbau]

The fun part is, if you get a spredsheet that is password locked so you can't make changes to certain cells, and open it in OO, then save it.. the locking is gone.

spreadsheet locking in excel isn't really used for security. Its mostly so that people don't delete formulas/change formatting by accident. There are widely distributed macro password crackers which take about 30 seconds-1 minute to crack. There isn't any real encryption.

[Devek]

I have a certain dislike for xml... seeing as OO uses that mostly for it's native files I got a tad ticked off and went back to the Office I had gotten at school. Nowadays though I am considering installing it on the new PC I'm going to build and simply purchasing Access 2007 on the side.

Gee, what file format do you think the new versions of msoffice use?

I've heard a lot of stupid arguments but that one takes the cake. Binary blobs that takes years to reverse engineer are better than open file formats?

MS Office uses XML now too, but apparently you have to have the source code to every version of office ever written to be able to implement it properly. Microsoft loves bullshit like that... nonetheless it will be trivial to figure out what is in the document now(though the formatting may be a mystery) when our great-grand kids stumble upon them.

[Popeh]

EDIT: Mainly for spreadsheet and word functions:

Open Office, albeit free IMO is crap.

Good for a free piece of software - but for a student/business etc it's not too great.

Post made on this before (probably on old forums) - main differences are:

For a SOLE user, meaning that you don;t plan on opening the files up on someone elses machines your fine. If you plan on taking your files to work/school chances are they use Microsoft Office.
This means you'll most likely lose your formatting (size, font, spaces, layout etc).

Summary:
Personal own PC use only for letters etc: O
Files being used on various machines that use MS Office: X

At least that's been my personal findings.

[Devek]

If you plan on sharing files with other people using msoffice's native file format is not a good idea either.

Tons of people haven't purchased microsoft office so if you plan on sharing documents and using their native file format you're pretty stupid.

Right now you can use .rtf to exchange documents that other people are supposed to use, and in the future when ms stops being such a retarded monopoly they can support the Oasis opendocument format like everyone else.

[SephYuyX]

If you plan on sharing files with other people using msoffice's native file format is not a good idea either.

Tons of people haven't purchased microsoft office so if you plan on sharing documents and using their native file format you're pretty stupid.

Right now you can use .rtf to exchange documents that other people are supposed to use, and in the future when ms stops being such a retarded monopoly they can support the Oasis opendocument format like everyone else.

What? Almost anyone who has a PC has office installed, pirated or not.
Even if they dont, MS provides free programs to do everything but edit the files.

[Cesaria]

We have it installed on our staff laptops at work so I use their version of powerpoint a lot - I find it's reallllllly slow to do anything in.

[SassiAsura]

I hate XML, SOAP and parsing XML. Plus it's a heavy file format if not compressed. It's fun and all to make some sort of standardization I guess... I just really hated SOAP...

[Devek]

Well I'm sorry you hate the best file formats our industry has to offer.

I suppose the alternative is so much better huh?

Opendocument format is compressed.. 3 completely separate office packages have fully implemented it very easilly. Some governments have already mandated the use of opendocument format for all official documents and it has the full backing of IBM, Intel, Sun, and others.

Compare that to msoffice's file format which has never been fully implemented by any other software (not for lack of trying.) Why is it hard? Imagine if you wrote a program and decided to just dump all your memory to a file? Thats pretty much how MS does it to the extent there were 'incidents' of sensitive information being found in word documents that were never a part of the document in the first place, just data that happened to be in memory at the time the document was saved.

So lets recap..

When you buy msoffice.. You're paying $200 for grammar check and you're making anyone who wants to be able to modify your files pay up the nose also to be able to use your documents(especially if they have to buy a copy of windows also).