Your thoughts about Open Office

Phil2008

Phil2008

Phil2008

Soldato
Joined
17 Dec 2004
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What to you guys think of open office, as I bought a sony vaio laptop of the bay for a guy and he wants a package on it like ms office but free?
 
I never saw the point of Open Office, except on Linux, MS Office is easy to come by for free if you know where to look
 
There's no point pretending that OpenOffice/LibreOffice is as good as MS Office - it isn't - but for 98.347% of users it will be "good enough", which is the important thing.

The only snag is when you have to exchange files with MS Office users on a regular basis - compatability is sometimes less-than-perfect, although simple documents without fancy formatting should usually be OK.
 
There some excellent offers for proper Office 2010 as well if you know where to look.

If you are a student you can get full Office Professional Plus 2010 for ~£40 from various MS software resellers, some specialising in software for students.

Office 2010 Home and Student 3 user pack is on the rainforest place for ~£80

If you work for a company with a Microsoft Enterprise Agreement you are almost certainly allowed a personal copy of Office 2010 under the home use program for about £10.

Plenty of ways to get the legit MS Office for a reasonable price these days and frankly I don't see the point fiddling around with the dead end that is Libre Office settling for "almost but not quite" unless you really are on the most shoestring of budgets. ;)
 
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I ran Open Office on my netbook, and Office 2003 on my desktop for a year, and had no problems with compatability when moving files between them. Got Office 2010 on both now though.
 
Open Office is dead.

I cant remeber where I read it now, but since Libre Office launched, the developers working on Libre office have done far more work than the work which has been done on Open Office.

Most of the bright minds, moved over to Libre.
 
I used OpenOffice for 12 months of my degree, just as an experiment, and it was fine. Microsoft Office is better though, and at the end of the day I thought the difference was worth paying for so I went back to using MS Office.
 
MS Office is easily better, but for most people Libre/Open Office is good enough. If you want something thats free Libre Office is your best bet.
 
ng93 said:
MS Office is easily better, but for most people Libre/Open Office is good enough. If you want something thats free Libre Office is your best bet.
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Agreed.

I would call myself a power user, so i use MS Office - i simply cannot get on with Libre/Open office, there are too many things which become difficult or impossible to do.

However, any none-power users of an office suite will be happy with Libre/Open Office - suitable for writing letters and so on.
 
I used to use OpenOffice but it always felt very heavy. Has that been sorted in the newer LibreOffice? I heard there is an Android version coming, wonder how they will strip out the fat. Hope they succeed though, always good to have a free alternative.
 
At work I have installed Open Office on all our sites as it is good to have a free functional office suite. I will try out Libre Office though and see what that looks and feels like...
 
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