Issues with your account? Bug us in the Discord!
Anyone an OpenOfficer user?
Freejack
Jake the Not-so-Wise
in Zocalo v2.0
Just want to get your feedback on what you thought of it when compared to M$?
With the purchase of the new computer, we need an Office-like software, but I'd rather not pay the Office-like price. It unit came with Wordperfect and Lotus, but I need a presentation software also.
Any thoughts?
Jake
With the purchase of the new computer, we need an Office-like software, but I'd rather not pay the Office-like price. It unit came with Wordperfect and Lotus, but I need a presentation software also.
Any thoughts?
Jake
Comments
My Dad, who often uses very complex spreadsheets, also found that it does everything he needs, although he found that the difference in how to do things took quite a bit of getting used to over Excel. My Mum had more trouble adapting for her use of Writer.
I think that if you're an average home user, openoffice will do everything you need.
OpenOffice is far better than MS Word - many more options and better compatibility. Try doing a wavy underline in MS Word. Try doing a find and replace on all italic and change them to underline in word. OOo supports all that :)
The biggest lack in OOo is the poor dictionary it has associated with the spell checker. 40% of the words I use aren't in it, and I have to go check them in a paper dictionary to insure the spelling before adding them to OOo's user dictionary, which nicely doesn't know that 8's, *s, and first letter caps are all the same word as an entirely lowercase version.
[B]
My Dad, who often uses very complex spreadsheets, also found that it does everything he needs, although he found that the difference in how to do things took quite a bit of getting used to over Excel. My Mum had more trouble adapting for her use of Writer.[/B][/QUOTE]
Cool, spreadsheets would be the most "advanced" operation I'd do, next to maybe presentations. Has your dad had any compitibilty issues bring excel sheets in?
I guess I will have to check it out.
Jake
I've done a few presentations in OO. it does the job, but I wish the grid snap worked.
[B]I tried to use Open Office. I really wanted to like it. Ultimately, however, I just couldn't get past the fact that it is not as robust as Office, and every release of Open Office has been increasingly bloated. There are lots of little things Open Office just doesn't get right, and that was enough to force me back to Office XP. [/B][/QUOTE]
Does this mean you like Clippy?
[B]No conversion problems that I know of.
I've done a few presentations in OO. it does the job, but I wish the grid snap worked. [/B][/QUOTE]
Biggles, ever tried [URL=http://www.w3.org/Talks/Tools/Slidy/]HTML Slidy[/URL]? Its preferred by W3C.
[B]Does this mean you like Clippy? [/B][/QUOTE]
This means I like precise page formatting controls, among many other things.
Word does not have precise formatting controls. I work with word every day at work - you'd be amazed at how many impresice formatting controls it has that you bang at with a hammer to get things to do what you want. I'm not talking about a small 5 of 10 page document. I'm talking 120-500 page documents. Word just doesn't like things that big. It doesn't play nice.
If you want precise formatting controls, go use Indesign (Adobe product) which is designed for layout and formatting control. It makes every product you've ever worked with seem amature.
Examples:
Print a 130 page manual from word that has odd and even page breaks (in duplex mode) and occasionally word will mix up which is odd and which is even, and suddenly your section start is starting on the back of a page, and the front of that page is blank becuase it's telling the printer that it is the wrong page to start on.
Number chapters with "continue" option (which you have to do for section breaks, which in turn are needed for odd/even breaks) and it sometimes skips numbers becuase it has phantom section breaks.
Break a table between two pages and try and rejoin it: Not going to happen.
I could go on and on - we encounter these very annoying bugs all the time...MS Word is just crap.
[B]I don't think Word is fantastic. I'm not even saying it's good. But Open Office wasn't even robust enough to handle formatting single pages and ten page papers. Every complaint I have about Word only gets worse in Open Office. [/B][/QUOTE]
Have you tried Abiword? Unlike the formatting of MS Word, it actually works.
as for indesign, yes it rocks, I cant use it, but I have people to do these things for me. People who work for hello kitty products!
At first the spreadsheets seemed to load fine, but as I used it and changed things, it clobbered itself and wouldnt move the data around from some fields to others properly.