Open Office

kevbiss1

kevbiss1

kevbiss1

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A friend of mine needs a copy of microsoft office for working from home purposes,im not sure what she will be doing exactly,been looking into this for her,is open office.org similiar? this software i beleive is free!will it do a similiar job?
 
In short, yes. However it does look and feel a little different, so as long as they don't mind finding their way a bit with it then go for it. If they don't get on with it, then go for MS Office.
 
Open office is excellent and quite ok for most of us. Just because its free don't mean it aint no good - well not in this case!
 
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I've only really used Writer in OO (like MS Word).
The only thing that annoys me is that when you try to open the saved document in MS Word, it changes the format slightly even when saved as a MS Word document. For example when I was at home I saved a 2 page long CV in OO, when I tried to open it in MS Word at work, it ended up being 3 pages long and some of the formatting has changed.

Not a problem I guess if she's just going to stick to OO though..
 
SiriusB said:
It looks and feels awful, but will do the job.
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That. I tried it out before, I only have Microsoft Office on my MacBook and fancied doing a bit of work on my Windows PC. Downloaded Open Office and yes, while I can appreciate it's free it's still not a very nice experience. It's free for a reason, it will do the job but don't expect any frills.
 
K1LLSW1TCH said:
That. I tried it out before, I only have Microsoft Office on my MacBook and fancied doing a bit of work on my Windows PC. Downloaded Open Office and yes, while I can appreciate it's free it's still not a very nice experience. It's free for a reason, it will do the job but don't expect any frills.
Click to expand...
I don't agree that it looks "awful" - to me it just looks like a generic Windows app with traditional menus and toolbars, nothing fancy admittedly but perfectly functional, and not really notable one way or the other.

I don't think even its most ardent supporters would claim that ultimately it's as capable as MS Office - it just isn't - and of course full MS Office compatibility might be an issue if you're often exchanging documents with others. The crucial point though is that it's *good enough* for most people, most of the time - yes, you can usually pick up MS Office quite cheaply if you know where to look, but if a free alternative does everything you need why spend even that small amount?

The main issue I have with it is that the on-screen font rendering in Writer occasionally seems a bit messy, particularly when you compare it with the same document opened in MS Word, but it's a minor thing really. :)
 
Latest version of OO looks fine, I use it at home and we're looking into using it at work as an alternative to MS Office (sick of the licensing costs.)
 
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