Anyone know anything about Open Office?

Yucca

Yucca

Yucca

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Joined
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Nock/Leicester
Hi guys

My company is looking to buy three new pc's and as it is to be used on a commercial premises we need Office for business as apposed to home. This is very expensive.

I have suggested Open Office but am concerned that it may not do the job...

We only use Office for basic Word/Excel.

I am concerned about the following and would love some advice

1) Office comes with Outlook, Open Office does not. But windows 7 has a built in email software right?

2) Compatibility - Will documents saved in Open Office work fine in Word/Excel etc and the other way around

3) Is the layout of Word/Excel 99% the same? My managers are a little 'slow' so it needs to be what they are used to.

Thanks
 
You could try Mozilla Thunderbird - thats Open source email, I have never tried it, but its free and Ive heard its not too bad
 
Yucca said:
Hi guys

My company is looking to buy three new pc's and as it is to be used on a commercial premises we need Office for business as apposed to home. This is very expensive.

I have suggested Open Office but am concerned that it may not do the job...

We only use Office for basic Word/Excel.

I am concerned about the following and would love some advice

1) Office comes with Outlook, Open Office does not. But windows 7 has a built in email software right?

2) Compatibility - Will documents saved in Open Office work fine in Word/Excel etc and the other way around

3) Is the layout of Word/Excel 99% the same? My managers are a little 'slow' so it needs to be what they are used to.

Thanks
Click to expand...

1) Use Thunderbird
2) Should be fine unless you do some strange formatting that's unique to open office or unique to Word
3) All the usual B I U buttons etc. are there and recognisable.

Try it for yourself :)
 
OpenOffice is all but dead.
Use LibreOffice instead.

My LibreOffice spreadsheets will open in Excel 2007, but only the cell values and formats are imported. Formulas and macros are not.
 
Tomsk said:
My LibreOffice spreadsheets will open in Excel 2007, but only the cell values and formats are imported. Formulas and macros are not.
Click to expand...

How can you suggest something that saves in a format that won't allow you to import formulae into Excel? How is that a viable alternative to Openoffice, which does carry them over? They're a pretty essential feature of many spreadsheets. Openoffice allows pretty much complete compatibility with the Microsoft suite.

I have openoffice and it works well, I prefer it to the new versions of microsoft office because they haven't gone with the idiotic tab system and have kept menus. I can only guess at the productivity cost of microsoft's switch to that new layout! :eek:
 
Thunderbird is the email client you want.

We use that as the main email program at work.

As for Open Office. First of, change it too Libre Office.

Long story short, the devs working on open office, didnt like the direction Oracle was inmosing on the project so they broke off to continue working on an open version of open office, called libre office.

The layout of Libre office, is similar to office 2003 suite.

Is it up to the job... I would think so yes.

Things are mostly similar, but as with anything practice makes perfect.
 
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Phenomenologica said:
How can you suggest something that saves in a format that won't allow you to import formulae into Excel? How is that a viable alternative to Openoffice, which does carry them over? They're a pretty essential feature of many spreadsheets. Openoffice allows pretty much complete compatibility with the Microsoft suite.

I have openoffice and it works well, I prefer it to the new versions of microsoft office because they haven't gone with the idiotic tab system and have kept menus. I can only guess at the productivity cost of microsoft's switch to that new layout! :eek:
Click to expand...

He has a point as I pointed out above, before even reading his post.

If there is aproblem with importing macros... then that not a good thing.

It depends if the op needs such functionality, and also if this is something that the document foundation will add to the project.
 
opethdisciple said:
He has a point as I pointed out above, before even reading his post.

If there is aproblem with importing macros... then that not a good thing.

It depends if the op needs such functionality, and also if this is something that the document foundation will add to the project.
Click to expand...

I wouldn't have taken issue with anything he said, but not properly exporting formulae or macros to Excel isn't a minor problem!
 
Yucca said:
Hi guys

My company is looking to buy three new pc's and as it is to be used on a commercial premises we need Office for business as apposed to home. This is very expensive.

I have suggested Open Office but am concerned that it may not do the job...

We only use Office for basic Word/Excel.

I am concerned about the following and would love some advice

1) Office comes with Outlook, Open Office does not. But windows 7 has a built in email software right? There is simply no equivalent to Outlook apart from perhaps things like Lotus, if you make use of shared calandering, tasks, contacts and so on or if using Exchange then forget it, you will need Outlook.

2) Compatibility - Will documents saved in Open Office work fine in Word/Excel etc and the other way around No, we run into interoperability problems on a daily basis, trying to exchange OO documents with MS Office customers is simply a nightmare

3) Is the layout of Word/Excel 99% the same? My managers are a little 'slow' so it needs to be what they are used to. Depends on the edition of Office, OO is similar to Office 2003, i say similar as certain key features, menus and options are near impossible to find if you are used to MS Office

Thanks
Click to expand...

Bottom line is, if you are an Office power user - large complex documents then MS Office is the only suitable way to go - OO/LO is just a massive PITA.

I'd love to switch to it, but there is too much it just doesn't do, and when you look through the forums for an answer to your problem and the answer is "Oh no sorry, OO doesn't do that" then that's not good enough.

Where are your PCs coming from? If from a major business supplier then you may find bundling MS Office with it becomes rather cheap.

Alternatively MS Office 365 (when it comes out of beta) will be around £15/user/month for Exchange, Lync and Office Pro Plus Subscription edition.

For standard deployments, for 5 licences and above you qualify for volume licencing which you may pay yearly or a one off. It also allows employees to purchase Office Pro Plus for use at home for £8.95.
 
Phenomenologica said:
How can you suggest something that saves in a format that won't allow you to import formulae into Excel? How is that a viable alternative to Openoffice, which does carry them over? They're a pretty essential feature of many spreadsheets. Openoffice allows pretty much complete compatibility with the Microsoft suite.

I have openoffice and it works well, I prefer it to the new versions of microsoft office because they haven't gone with the idiotic tab system and have kept menus. I can only guess at the productivity cost of microsoft's switch to that new layout! :eek:
Click to expand...

I should have made my reply clearer.

LibreOffice and Open Office are almost identical, because they have the same roots. However Sun (who now own OpenOffice) have basically said their not continuing with developement of OpenOffice.

The default .ods format of LibreOffice (and OpenOffice) spreadsheets will load into Excel, but formulas and macros are not imported, only cell values.
LibreOffice (and OpenOffice) can save to .xls format and when these files are loaded into Excel, formulas are imported, but macros are not. Some formulas will need amending to work correctly in Excel.
 
Tomsk said:
I should have made my reply clearer.

LibreOffice and Open Office are almost identical, because they have the same roots. However Sun (who now own OpenOffice) have basically said their not continuing with developement of OpenOffice.

The default .ods format of LibreOffice (and OpenOffice) spreadsheets will load into Excel, but formulas and macros are not imported, only cell values.
LibreOffice (and OpenOffice) can save to .xls format and when these files are loaded into Excel, formulas are imported, but macros are not. Some formulas will need amending to work correctly in Excel.
Click to expand...

That makes more sense. :)
 
rgritchie said:
Go with Open Office, not only will it do everything you need it to it will work a lot faster than MS Office ever did.
Click to expand...

Did you read the last few posts? It seems that its a dead office application now.

Personally, I would get them to fork out for office if they are not tech savvy, they will save things in the default open office (or t'other one) and send it to other companies. How many PC's are you talking about that need it?
 
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