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OpenOffice 2.0 vs. MS Office Review
trewornan writes "There's an interesting, if partisan, review of OpenOffice 2.0 in comparison to Microsoft Office over on Real Tech News. Open Office gets a general vote of approval, as you might guess from the title 'Open Office 2.0 Kicks MS Office Around The Block'" From the article: "My primary use for OpenOffice has always been as a word processor and I believe this is an area where it excels (so to speak!). For anyone used to MS Office, the difference in the two interfaces is minimal. In fact, I find it easier to use OpenOffice's interface than MS Office's for various things such as inserting a header and footer. To create or change a header and footer in MS Office XP, you must go to the "view" menu. I'm not sure why something like a header or footer would be placed in the "view" menu before it is actually part of a document."
Why would you compare it to the older version? Office XP is almost 5 years old. Why not be fair and compare it to 2003?
OOffice need's a gammar checker
"Another nice thing about OpenOffice is that it is actually a complete office suite."
You know, unlike MS Office.
Just seeing a single line like this in an article should immediately tip you off that it's probably not worth the bandwidth you used to download it.
"Quoting yourself is stupid." -Me
Given how long Open Office has been chasing after MS Office, it's about time it got close enough to give MS Office a kick; but, in my experience, Open Office comes off like Charlie Brown kicking that damn football.
I'm not a Windows apologist. I run a wintel box as a multimedia web box because too many formats are locked into MS apps and I'm not enough of a zealot to forgo information.
I've had MS pro copies of Office for many years and I've had years of experience with Linux. My opion is Open Office doesn't yet touch MS pro office, especially Power Point.
I'll keep MS Office Pro because it's not a big expense in terms of the extended latitude it offers.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
This summer I interned at a national lab and part of the requirements of the internship was creation of a scientific research style poster highlighting what I did. The people in charge of the posters were of the belief that there were only two correct tools for creating a poster: MS Powerpoint and Adobe Acrobat.
.ppt. Exporting as pdf worked perfectly though.
Unfortunately the poster people didn't mention such requirements to the IT people who had the interns all set up with Fedora Core 2 systems. Fortunately OpenOffice was installed on these systems. I could only hope Impress was on par with Powerpoint.
I was a little skeptical going in, I knew that the OOo guys had worked fairly hard to make their tools as good or better than the commercial products, but this was a fairly unusual niche requirement. I was creating a single 48x30 inch slide with all graphics being very high quality so they don't look like crap when blown up.
The results were superb! I used Calc to do graphs, and cut-n-paste between Calc and Impress worked flawlessly. I used Draw to do line art graphics, and once again cut-n-paste worked perfectly. Throw in a touch of gimp to clean up some of the graphics being used and the whole thing had a professional look to it on par with any of the Powerpoint posters from years past.
The only thing that didn't work was exporting as
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
This is a complete waste of time and does not merit the front page of slashdot. C'mon - did Zonk even look at TFA?
Just off the top of my head, there is no:
- comparison of file sizes
- analysis version tracking
- comparison of printing/preview capability
- review of scripting capabilities and availability of scripts
- review of the style system
- interoperability of: templates, objects etc
I am underwhelmed.OpenOffice also supports all of the major features of MS Office (and a few of its own) except for the grammar check. I'm personally fine with not having a grammar checker since it has given me the opportunity to actually learn the English language instead of relying on my word processor to make my sentences coherent. Erm... and I trust he's also personally fine without having a spell checker for exactly the same reason? And pocket calculators weaken my mind because I should be able to do it in my head or on paper? What world is this guy living in? I like my computer programs to be smart and do things for me by noticing, say, subtle flaws in the document that my proof reading might not pick up. Word's grammar check can indeed be useful at times, especially with some of the few slightly more obscure grammatical checks it has that we may not pick up from everyday usage but are still good to know.
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2001/Mar
March 5, 2001 -- Microsoft Corp. today announced that Microsoft® Office XP, the new version of the world's leading office software, has been released to manufacturing and will be available for retail purchase later this spring.
Then came SP1 and SP2 andOne more thing : This is my first post on slashdot! After 4 years of wasting my time just reading
OpenOffice is perfectly usable in a business environment. Just like with any word processor make and model, you want to have your whole company on the exact same software.
/so/ hate red. And what's that strange office package you use? Sucks too!
We are a ~50 people company, everyone uses OO.org. We exchange documents with clients -- long, complex technical specs, with version control, the works. Every once in a while, there's a glitch in formatting after the document has been edited by both sides a dozen times. But that happens with different versions of Word too!
Of course, those formatting glitches are a problem when you are pitching for new business. Easy: we do have 2 licenses for Windows+MSOffice, which we run under VMWare to proof the documents when it's a document tender that requires MSWord format. Even easier: we send PDFs exported with a single-click from OO.org. Sending PDFs makes us look slick, doesn't have formatting issues, and the files aren't editable (at least for mere mortals).
OO.org is a perfectly viable business tool. Our main clients are government departments and large private companies. The MSWord compatibility is good enough that if you have $0.01 of smarts to negotiate the small glitches _and_ you're good at what you do, you are sorted.
If you are not good at what you do... there'll be all sorts of excuses. Oh! your logo is RED. I