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Is it Time for Open Office?

Posted by Cliff on from the opportunity-for-adoption dept.

lazyron asks: "I've been using Open Office a bit more lately, and got to thinking: this is much more like my current version of Microsoft Office than Office 2007 will be. Could it be time to try Open Office in the workplace, especially since there is still some time left before Office 2007 will be forced on us by the demands of the product cycle? Are there any IT admins out there thinking about trying Open Office, either with a few users or all of them?"

2 of 449 comments (clear)

  1. Of course.... by Creepy+Crawler · · Score: 0, Troll

    Not.

    OO is different than the offering at MS, and is "incompatible" with every last feature (bloat) that they offer. Because it's not 100% exactly right, not many businesses will care.. Now if MS gets a cracking on "illegal installs", well, that probably would do the trick.

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    1. Re:Of course.... by Creepy+Crawler · · Score: 0, Troll

      ---Parent is very wrong. I'm one of a couple of devs in my office using Ubuntu as my desktop. I use Open Office and can open all docs that people send to me: Powerpoint, Excel, Word docs. They all work fine. Plus I can export as PDF's and a variety of other formats. The only time I have run into a problem is when people are saving in a very old format like Word97. But then, even Microsoft Office users have the same problem and do the same thing I do... ask the user to resend in a more recent format.

      That right there is sad.. that you need to have the experience of a developer and use Linux to maintain usability with OpenOffice. With MS editing tools, yes, you do have occasional format problems, but those can be solved by asking the person to save as another MS format. If worse comes to worst, save as RTF.

      However, there's an easier way to get consumers to switch, and thats to say to pay 500$ for Office suite, or FREE for OO. Still, its going to be horrendously confusing, and they'll most likely end up pirating Office anyways.

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