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Open Office

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jwinslow said:
I've only used it briefly, but I thought it worked pretty well. It was awesome when it was still free.

http://www.openoffice.org/product/reviews.html
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I'm pretty certain it still is free. Not sure if I missed something or if I'm misunderstanding what you said there. I downloaded an upgrade a month or so ago for nothing...

I have both OpenOffice and MS Office on my computer and I use them interchangably. With comparable features and nearly identical layouts, most times you can't even tell the difference. You won't realize that you're not using Microsoft until you look at your wallet. :wink:

There are a few things that won't display properly when switching from one office to the other, but most everything will transfer and render properly. Open Office even has a saving option to save in MS-specific file-type, as to ensure complete compatibility.
 
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A couple colleagues have told me that OO's Powerpoint equivalent is actually better than Powerpoint. If I had the choice of paying for Office or using OO for free, it wouldn't be a tough decision. OO has a ton of great features.
 
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I agree with kenlin. The new OO 2.0 version is very good and is compatible. MS is trying to take MS Office up-market with new search functionality and etc but I find it to have major compatibility problems with itself now (spent 4 hours this week trying to sort out problems in a paper with a European colleague).

If you save OO and MS O in xml format, which is the new ISO standard, courtesy of OO, then the two packages should be exactly compatible. Otherwise, the OO will sometimes have some very small incompatibility (i.e., a typeface may change for a slide title in the PowerPoint equivalent.)

A really nice function of OO is the ability to output directly to Adobe pdf format. If you are a student writing research, it also comes with a free bibliography database that interfaces with the word processor. It's not EndNote, but its free!

All in all, I have installed only OO on a few of my office machines and I am not worried at all about compatibility problems. Goodbye update license fees.
 
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jwinslow said:
maybe I'm just stupid, I thought I remembered it moving to a pay version... but obviously I'm wrong.
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Thankfully it is still the ..
free office suite
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I'd highly recommend anyone to look at this alternative to MSofts offerings. This suite of applications, as much as Linux has to have the folks in Seattle staying awake at night. It has a solid code base and is constantly kept up to date. I first got to look at the product when it was actually a for-pay item called StarOffice. OpenOffice looked good then, it looks better now.
 
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Steve19 said:
I agree with kenlin. The new OO 2.0 version is very good and is compatible. MS is trying to take MS Office up-market with new search functionality and etc but I find it to have major compatibility problems with itself now (spent 4 hours this week trying to sort out problems in a paper with a European colleague).

If you save OO and MS O in xml format, which is the new ISO standard, courtesy of OO, then the two packages should be exactly compatible. Otherwise, the OO will sometimes have some very small incompatibility (i.e., a typeface may change for a slide title in the PowerPoint equivalent.)

A really nice function of OO is the ability to output directly to Adobe pdf format. If you are a student writing research, it also comes with a free bibliography database that interfaces with the word processor. It's not EndNote, but its free!

All in all, I have installed only OO on a few of my office machines and I am not worried at all about compatibility problems. Goodbye update license fees.
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Good info. Have you tried out the bibliography features much? We have a lot of people at my place of employment that use Endnote... but they don't wanna pay for the newer versions. I swear half of em are on Endnote 5 still. I can't believe it still works.
 
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I am pretty sure OO has always been free. I think Sun's version was Star Office and that had a modest fee.

I have used them in the past but am still a MS person. I do remember it lacking something, perhaps it was Outlook.
 
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NorthShoreBuck said:
I am pretty sure OO has always been free. I think Sun's version was Star Office and that had a modest fee.

I have used them in the past but am still a MS person. I do remember it lacking something, perhaps it was Outlook.
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There is not a Windows compatible Outlook equivilent yet, but there is an Outlook-alike Linux app called Evolution.

http://www.gnome.org/projects/evolution/

There is a crude calendar project under the Mozilla brand which is currently called Sunbird. Is is only in v0.3 but is functional as a scheduling app. Where that project eventually goes is anyones guess, though it should be built up to eventually support cross compatibility with Thunderbird, which would have the benefit of having email/contacts seperate and independant from the scheduling app, while still being one-click accessible.

Sushi, check the OO Biblio Wiki:

http://bibliographic.openoffice.org/
 
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