OpenOffice Or Microsoft ? openoffice.org or Microsoft Office

[Jeigh1405241495 0]

I like MS Office a bit more just because its a bit smoother feeling to me, but thats moving into personal preferance territory. Feature wise they are similar, I'm sure MS Office has a bit more oomph but overall they are pretty comparable. If you have the choice between dropping the $$$'s or going OO.O I'd say open office. If yuo can get a free copy of MS office why not use both lol.Plus, as mentioned, OO.O is the pwnage when it comes to linux open source stuff, plus OO 2.0 is looking pretty snazzy

[madcrow 0]

OpenOffice 2 has just about all the features of M$ Office and near 100% file format compatability so that you can read files sent to you from less-enlightened people. Given the price and the huge number of features, I'd say OpenOffice is the superior offering.

[Jeigh1405241495 0]

Yea, I'd agree completely if you factor in price its obviously the best choice, I mean, ya can't beat free (especially when its high quality free). Personally if you put the two side by side simple as software vs softwrae I still prefer M$ Office a bit, dunno why, just do.

[qwijibow 0]

What about KDE-Office ???Does anyone else use that ???

[rapco 0]

Well, open office is a great option. But as many as the posters in this thread, i would rather have a 100% compatability .doc....So i prefer Word, and it has more "complements" avaibables in the present time too!

[Grafitti 0]

ok, so i tried openoffice. it was ok, but the GUI is sort of irritating. i don't like it as much as MSoffice. i'll really give it a while before i try it again. the only reason i would use it is if i get my computer booting linux as well, in which case i would use it for that. sorry, but microsoft still is better ------- as long as you have the cash.

[jipman 0]

Better as in what? Userfriendlyness, maybe, but that depends, most people just want ready-to-go-and-understand-it-at-first-run software GUI's, some other people go for quality and are motivated enough to learn how to use the less userfriendlier GUI'ed software, which is usually faster (if less graphical), or has more advanced options.

[iGuest 3]

I use OpenOffice but must suggest you familiarise yourself with MS Office because of it's mainstream use. A lot of job requirements is your experience with MS Office, it would be nice to see OpenOffice as the experience needed though.OpenOffice lives up to standards, it isn't behind MS Office, it's competitive and does the job well.It definitely is the choice if your budget is tight. If MS Office is being used at school/work then use that for better compatibility though. OpenOffice meets some of MS Office standards and can read it's file formats, but it still does lack with some of the formatting and display.If there is no requirement needed for MS Office, I would definitely stick with OpenOffice all the way.Cheers,MC

[kaputnik 0]

Well I've been using Open Office for the last 4 months now, on my personal computer. There are a bunch of features not yet available in the Open Office suite like making the background tables dissapear in Calc while in Excel, something like this is quite simple. Also, since I make a huge number of presentations, and just about all of them require a good deal of animation and customization, I find a large gap in the available features and the simplicity of usage between Impress and Powerpoint. Other than that.. getting used to the various Open Office software was no problem at all, infact it all came quite naturally. Here in India, Acer has begun offering very cheap computers, fully loaded, with Linux and OO s/w, and a large majority of personal users are migrating to open source.

[madcrow 0]

Well the Presentation program may not be as good as PowerPoint, but I would argue that the important parts, the WordProcessor and the Spreadsheet kick *bottom*. Of course, WordPefect office beats everything and that's a fact...

[Grafitti 0]

Better as in what? Userfriendlyness, maybe, but that depends, most people just want ready-to-go-and-understand-it-at-first-run software GUI's, some other people go for quality and are motivated enough to learn how to use the less userfriendlier GUI'ed software, which is usually faster (if less graphical), or has more advanced options.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

well, you might be right, as i only spent a few days with openoffice. maybe it's just being familiar with M$ and all, but everything from the viewing on screen to the commands, format, and menus seems so much easier in office. like i said, thogh, i'm not stuck on office, and will install both programs on my dual-boot system.

[QBRADQ 0]

I use MS Office at school, as it is the only option. However, at home I use OpenOffice, although I own a copy of MS Office XP. When I found OpenOffice, I figured I'd use it untill I found reason to go back to MS Office. So far, I havn't found a reason.I'm kinda at conflict with this particular issue. I am currently an MCP (Microsoft Certified Professional), and am studying for my MCSA and MCSE. I also have a decade of experiance developing for Windows platforms. So yea, you could say I'm a Microsoft guy.However, I am also a supporter of the open source community, and as such recomend open source software over paid software. Heh, in fact over the past two days I have recomended OpenOffice to one person on this forum, and a whole classroom full of people at my school, as well as my instructor.Odd thing is, I always save in MSO .DOC format, just in case I ever do go back to MS Office.I suppose the main thing that Open Office has over MS Office is that it's cross-platform. That's a huge selling point at school, as half the people in the networking class use *NIX and variants.Quick OT comment: Closed-source OSes are generaly better in the security department because potential hackers can't just browse the source looking for vulnerabilities.QBRADQ

[sickgrrl723 0]

i'm not sure, i had a bad experience with openoffice once and since i've always used Microsoft Office (even as a kid) i'll have to stick with that... i don't know if im just stubborn or what....

[clagnol1405241508 0]

I don't think the "quote" button works anymore.Anyways, some of you guys keep referring to OpenOffice.org's competition with Microsoft. Keep in mind that it is NOT a competition in the market sense of the word. Nobody is profitting financially from OOo. Microsoft is the only party with anything to lose, here.Somebody else mentioned that there are no other word processors for Linux. This is untrue. I'm sure there are several other popular word processors, and a host of other word processors that nobody cares about.Personally, I use OpenOffice.org, having switched a few years ago from Microsoft Office. I was especially impressed with OOo's PDF exportation. OOo lacks in a few areas, however. It doesn't have a grammar checker. When I composed essays in French or Spanish, I used Word's grammar checker to help me find errors. This is not an option in OOo, however. Not even in English. Another feature I appreciated in Word was the auto-recover feature. OOo doesn't have this, either.All that having been said, OOo v. 2.0 is supposed to have a lot of new useful features. And though I haven't checked, someone told me that it will have grammar checkers.

[yordan 10]

I don't think the "quote" button works anymore.

No problem with the quote button now.I was disappointed with OpenOffice. When interacting with people using Microsoft Word, the layout of the document change, the polices change, and when you add things the original authors feel you messed up their nice documents with your ugli addons.
Moreover, starting up Microsoft word needs a reasonable time on my system, starting OpenOffice needs a lot of time.
So, I definitively switch to abiword for my own usage.
I use Microsoft Word viewer (free) for reading the Microsoft documents, and I use abiword (very small and also free) for writing my own ones, in a way which is compatible with Microsoft word, even if the page layout seems different.
So, I open my collegue document, view it, and I write my own document saying "on page 3 add the following line".