open ofice

wupwup · 9 Apr 2009 at 14:11

i am getting my old pc ready for work and i need a ofice aplication for it. it has xp home. 2.8 ghz single core processor and >1gb ram. im tuck between putting office 2007/8 or open office on. i dont think it will be powerful enough to run office. how system heavy is open office? and can you open/make files that work with word as i will probaby transfer files over. thanks

Burnsy2023 · 9 Apr 2009 at 14:15

I've got Office 07 on a 1.6Ghz Pentium M and 512 RAM. Perfectly useable.

Oh and Office 2008 is only for Mac

reflux · 9 Apr 2009 at 14:16

Office is hardly a system hog.

In answer to your second question, Open Office will open .doc files fine

Smit · 9 Apr 2009 at 14:17

Office should run no problem to be honest. Sure it may be a little slow to Open but once opened then it shouldn't require much system resources.

Open Office can save in the standard .doc format I think. Not too sure about .docx since I haven't used Open Office in around 5 years

wupwup · 9 Apr 2009 at 14:22

cheers. waht are your personal preferences?

Smit · 9 Apr 2009 at 14:24

I prefer Office although that is most likely down to just being used to using it.

When I used Open Office is just looked plain and dull and the formatting wasn't great. Although that was 5 years ago and I am sure they have improved it by now

RobH · 9 Apr 2009 at 14:42

Office 2007 runs fine on a 1.6 Ghz atom so it won't have much trouble with your system.

BlizzardX · 9 Apr 2009 at 15:15

I found the formatting options in Open office to be terrible. Bullets and tabs never really worked the same, and often messed up formatting from word documents.

theheyes · 9 Apr 2009 at 15:46

I have Office 2007 and Open Office. If you just want to fire out the odd document Open Office is great. If you spend a lot of time word processing, formatting and have to deal with other people's Word documents and macros all the time then there is no substitute for MS Office.

Hen_Dawg · 9 Apr 2009 at 17:32

If you don't want to pay for a word processor the open office is great

smogsy · 9 Apr 2009 at 23:22

i prefer open office 3.06 to Office 07

if i had to pay £200 for Office 07 or Open Office

id buy Open Office without a doubt it looks neater, linux style icons if it crashes it recovers 100% of data lost. office 07 still struggles at work.

only down side of openoffice its slower load up time to start with.

its a shame its written in java but also a plus.

C/C++ would been faster for Win

But Java makes easy to do cross-platform

Kennysevenfold · 10 Apr 2009 at 00:12

if you have a copy of ms office 2007 i would just pop that on, or save some money and use open office if you havent got a serial for ms office

killari · 10 Apr 2009 at 19:36

I'm a big fan of openoffice! I have Office 2007 Ultimate as well and it just feels slower (to load up). I also HATE the new layout. Can't find things for the life of me!

My work also involves a lot of heavy mathematical notation and I find that MS Word's equation system (although o.k) is not very convenient and can be very hectic. The formula input in OO Writer is far more convenient. And yeah I know I should be using LaTeX this kinda stuff, but I cant be bothered.

Mind you MS Office only cost me £40 so I can't really complain