Open Office Apps

[jawjateck]

Not sure where to ask, but I'll start here. Does anyone have any experience with open office applications? Good or bad? Would love to hear from you. I want to purge microhell from my life forever, and am looking for alternatives to make that dream a reality.

 

Thanks.....

 

http://www.openoffice.org

[+ deej]

If you are using, for example, high-end features of Word to produce camera-ready book manuscripts, OO probably won't work so well. If you get it to work, many publishers still demand Word's DOC format. (Even as the new DOCX format gains market share.)

 

For most end-users, it's perfectly adequate.

 

I attended a conference (about a Microsoft product, nyuk, nyuk) where the presenters used OO's presentation product for their "powerpoint" slides and nobody noticed the difference.

 

It depends on your requirements, your usage patterns, and your need to interop with users of MS-Office. If your requirements are vanilla, OO will suffice.

[fedssocr1]

I agree with that. I had some issues with their spreadsheet program not operating quite the way I was used to in Excel. But I suspect they have updated the product since then.

 

Since it's free it's easy enough for you to try it out. Another option that might work for you depending on what your needs exactly are is Google docs. The nice thing about that is the ability to share documents with other users and the ability to easily collaborate.