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Has Anyone Tried Open Office?


littleflower+JMJ

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littleflower+JMJ

I'm trying this out because I've heard great things about it and if I can get something free instead of spending alot of money on Microsoft Office, that would be great. :yes:

[url="http://www.openoffice.org/"]http://www.openoffice.org/[/url]

wikipedia page: [url="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenOffice.org"]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenOffice.org[/url]

[quote]Product Description

OpenOffice.org the product is a multi-platform office productivity suite. It includes the key desktop applications, such as a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation manager, and drawing program, with a user interface and feature set similar to other office suites. Sophisticated and flexible, OpenOffice.org also works transparently with a variety of file formats, including those of Microsoft Office, and the vendor-neutral OpenDocument standard from OASIS.

Available in over 65 supported languages with more being constantly added by the community, OpenOffice.org runs stably and natively on Solaris, Linux (including PPC Linux), Windows, Mac OS X (X11), and numerous other platforms. Our porting page lists the platforms (ports) that OpenOffice.org can run on.

Written in C++ and with documented APIs licensed under the LGPL open-source license, OpenOffice.org allows any knowledgeable developer to benefit from the source. And, because the native file format for OpenOffice.org is the vendor-independent OpenDocument open standard, interoperability is easy, making future development and adoption more certain.[/quote]

its suppose to be compatible with office, FREE and actually better than Microsoft. I heard that it was created because some programmers felt Office was so expensive for being such a necessity so they created their own to give for free.

Anyways, this is another option thats free for those of us (like college students) who might need it.

I just need to try it out now lol Anyone else have it? :popcorn:

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[quote name='littleflower+JMJ' post='1374073' date='Aug 30 2007, 10:50 AM']I'm trying this out because I've heard great things about it and if I can get something free instead of spending alot of money on Microsoft Office, that would be great. :yes:

[url="http://www.openoffice.org/"]http://www.openoffice.org/[/url]

wikipedia page: [url="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenOffice.org"]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenOffice.org[/url]
its suppose to be compatible with office, FREE and actually better than Microsoft. I heard that it was created because some programmers felt Office was so expensive for being such a necessity so they created their own to give for free.

Anyways, this is another option thats free for those of us (like college students) who might need it.

I just need to try it out now lol Anyone else have it? :popcorn:[/quote]
I use OpenOffice almost exclusively, on Mac, Windows, and Linux. My employer, Vonage, installs it on all employee PC's.

OpenOffice is the open source versions of Sun's StarOffice, which has commercial support available, as well as more non-western fonts coming standard. Before sun bought it, it was created by StarDivision.

It's not as slick as MS Office, but it works very well. It's a big program, with really beefy memory requirements. As such, it actually starts up slower than MS Office.

I like OpenOffice better than MS Office because it exports to HTML nicely, it has built-in PDF export support, gives you a bit more low-level ability to tweak tables and such, and is free. It's support for MS Office formats is actually better than Microsoft's support for older versions of their own format.

To be honest, I haven't used the spreadsheet or presentation apps that much -- I simply don't have the need to do so. Well, that, and I loathe spreadsheets -- I always wind up using one for about 15 minutes, and get so frustrated, that I actually write a database-driven web app to do what I wanted to do in the spreadsheet.

It's interface is remenicient of older versions of MS Office (mostly, Office 97), which I actually prefer to the newer more wizardy versions.

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Archaeology cat

I love Open Office! It's easy to use, and I think it's better for what I need than MS Office is. For example, with my dissertation I have to include a lot of images in with the text. .doc files don't embed the images (or at least not autimatically, and I haven't figured out how to get them to do it), but Open Office does, so I can open it on another computer that doesn't have those images saved on it and still it. Of course, that other computer has to have Open Office, but still. Or I can just export the file to a pdf, and that works really well. I hope you like it as much as I do. :)

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littleflower+JMJ

[quote name='adt6247' post='1374079' date='Aug 30 2007, 10:00 AM']I use OpenOffice almost exclusively, on Mac, Windows, and Linux. My employer, Vonage, installs it on all employee PC's.

OpenOffice is the open source versions of Sun's StarOffice, which has commercial support available, as well as more non-western fonts coming standard. Before sun bought it, it was created by StarDivision.

It's not as slick as MS Office, but it works very well. It's a big program, with really beefy memory requirements. As such, it actually starts up slower than MS Office.

I like OpenOffice better than MS Office because it exports to HTML nicely, it has built-in PDF export support, gives you a bit more low-level ability to tweak tables and such, and is free. It's support for MS Office formats is actually better than Microsoft's support for older versions of their own format.

To be honest, I haven't used the spreadsheet or presentation apps that much -- I simply don't have the need to do so. Well, that, and I loathe spreadsheets -- I always wind up using one for about 15 minutes, and get so frustrated, that I actually write a database-driven web app to do what I wanted to do in the spreadsheet.

It's interface is remenicient of older versions of MS Office (mostly, Office 97), which I actually prefer to the newer more wizardy versions.[/quote]

Niceeee! thanks for sharing that....i knew we had some techies on here who could offer more than me being a beginner with this lol

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littleflower+JMJ

[quote name='Archaeology cat' post='1374081' date='Aug 30 2007, 10:02 AM']I love Open Office! It's easy to use, and I think it's better for what I need than MS Office is. For example, with my dissertation I have to include a lot of images in with the text. .doc files don't embed the images (or at least not autimatically, and I haven't figured out how to get them to do it), but Open Office does, so I can open it on another computer that doesn't have those images saved on it and still it. Of course, that other computer has to have Open Office, but still. Or I can just export the file to a pdf, and that works really well. I hope you like it as much as I do. :)[/quote]

see I didn't even know about open office until recently :weep: and was looking into with my little brother and cousin for school reasons!

LOL Btw I Just read your sig...very hilarious! :hehe:

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Archaeology cat

[quote name='littleflower+JMJ' post='1374085' date='Aug 30 2007, 03:05 PM']see I didn't even know about open office until recently :weep: and was looking into with my little brother and cousin for school reasons!

LOL Btw I Just read your sig...very hilarious! :hehe:[/quote]


Thanks. :) I love that sketch of Will Ferrell impersonating Harry Caray. :)

Actually, I found out about Open Office when I got my laptop, because it came with Open Office instead of MS Office (it was a refurbished computer). Then my husband started using it, too, and we both prefer it to MS Office.

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Lounge Daddy

The public libraries here all use it and I tried it at home. The free-ness was the only thing that I personally liked. It seemed to be a bit of a memory hog so it runs really slow - both at home and on the library's computers, and everything else runs slow while Open Office is running.

Edited by Lounge Daddy
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I use NeoOffice on my Mac (it's the OS X looking version of OpenOffice basically) and I really like it a lot. It does take a little longer to open, but other than that it's great!

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Lounge Daddy

[quote name='Winchester' post='1374112' date='Aug 30 2007, 10:58 AM']The 60's called. They want their Maoism back.
Communist.[/quote]

:lol_roll:

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littleflower+JMJ

winchester is a winnie! well...just for calling me a commie :lol:

which reminds me, the guy i sit next to in all my grad courses is the assistant fire chief for the city over here </hijack>

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OpenOffice is nice. It came with Ubuntu Linux. Nice program. I don't have MS Office, but I've used it often in the past for school reports and such. Definitely worth getting.

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[quote name='isilzha' post='1374414' date='Aug 30 2007, 07:01 PM']I prefer Microsoft Office, but prefer the Open Office price. ;)[/quote]


That pretty much says it all

Lacking advanced skills at image manipulation (that would be anything more advanced than using the "open" or "save" commands, when our parish website needed/wanted to post a presentation, I was able to convert the power point presentation from the MS format into a flash presentation format using the Open Office presentation tool . . . just opened it, and saved it in the other format . . . MS won't do that, and I couldn't figure out a way to do it in Flash either

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