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Associated Press Reviews OpenOffice
blacklily8 writes "Peter Svensson of the Associated Press has reviewed OpenOffice and declared it a Microsoft Office killer: 'Microsoft Corp. killed off the competition for office software suites and became a de facto monopoly in the area, with what result? The competition is back and, this time, it's free!' Svensson thinks the better Word/WordPerfect file conversion, ability to save as PDF, and new BASE database component make the beta a better candidate for success than the previous versions--and when the kinks get worked out, step back!"
I hear many people complain about OpenOffice.org not opening their MS documents with correct formatting, but these people don't realize that this is not a limitation of OpenOffice, but a result of Microsofts closed and proprietary document formats.
When I've used OpenOffice.org's document format, I've been very pleased. Especially since sxw is just a zip package that you can open up and edit by hand.. this make automating document processing really easy..
I'll be perfectly fine if MS Office disappears and never returns.
The road between democracy and tyranny is paved with secrecy in the name of security.
Most likely. I asked my wife to try it out as an alternative to PowerPoint, but it didn't work well for her because she had to keep saving things in PP format (because OO isn't on the computers she uses for presentations) and was especially freaked the first few times when OO complained that if she converted things to PP format then she might lose stuff.
If you can work in an OO-only environment, it's probably OK, but the OO-PP interoperability was not good. Some of the slides it made (and she started editing presentations made with PP originally) weren't showing up in PP. Ah well...
EricMake Easy Money with Google -- out on June 17!
I'm a plain old text editor guy. VIM when I'm feeling fancy. However, OpenOffice really is a no-brainer when compared to MSOffice. Especially when you compare the price (free, versus $500). I use it for spreadsheet work all the time and love it.
The only problem I've really had with previous versions (other than a less pleasant interface than it now has) is the somewhat poor format conversion ability. Importing MSOffice files of various types were a pain to an impossibility. So far, I've had no problems importing them with the new beta.
I was talking to someone who operates a small office the other day and he was complaining about the thousands of dollars it was going to cost to equip a handful of users with Office on their machines - when all he needed to do was some spreadsheeting and office memo/document type stuff.
I pointed him at OpenOffice.org and he was blown away. Everyone in the office had it installed, operating and using it productively by the end of the week. It was difficult convincing them, however, that there was no catch. That it was really free. After all, you have people like some random guys on G4TV and radio-based "computer shows" and some websites spouting idiotic bullshit like "If a program is free, you can be sure it has adware, spyware and maybe viruses". Talk about hyperbole.