Microsoft Office vs. Open Office

[Sonnie]

I have always used Microsoft Office ... for years, although it is quite expensive.

Does anyone use Sun Microsystems Open Office and how does it compare to MS Office?

It appears the Writer program will read MS Word documents, and I am assuming the Calc program will read MS Excel files as well as the it's Draw program can read MS Publisher files. Can anyone confirm this before I take the time to download it?

Of course now I see they have a forum, so if no one is familiar with it, I can always join and post there.

[Mike P.]

I use Open Office on my 1 Gig laptop. I find Open Office to be slow and pokey, but it gets the job done. You get what you pay for. Download it and try it out. It may or may not be what you're looking for, depending on your requirements.

[nova]

Yes, it works fine. I've used it for many years. It is a bit slow and has some oddities here and there (I always had problems with Power Point files in Open Office). In general it will do what you need it to. I had used Borland (Word Perfect) Office suite since the early '90's when I got it with a student discount. Then upgraded to Corel Office, then to Open Office, and just this year went to MS Office Enterprise 2007.

I really hate to admit it but, going to MS has really made things much easier. I'd still be using Open Office today except I could not pass up the Home Use Program offered by MS and my employer. This Home Use Program gave me the complete suite for $20, so I've converted.

[Mike P.]

Yes, definitely not for Power Point presentations. It doesn't "flow" properly.

[tonyvdb]

I've been using Open office for about two years and its gone through some really good improvements and is now very capable of doing almost everything that MS Office can do but as said the power point is still a little buggy.

[thxgoon]

I also use open office. It does most things MS does and a lot of things are much easier than MS, though it can be buggy at times. Can't beat free and cross platform!

[Sonnie]

I mainly use Word, Publisher and Excel... actually those are the only ones I use out of the MS 2003 Office SBE.

I suppose maybe I should download it and try it out.

[basementjack]

I tied open office - it was a nice free toolset.

These days I would try the free google offerings - though they don't have a publisher equivilent.

[eugovector]

I tried Open Office about a year ago. It did work great, but as previously mentioned, was much slower then MS Office.

Have you considered Google Documents? They are most useful right now if you have a consistent online connection, but are going offline as well:

http://blogs.pcworld.com/staffblog/archives/006744.html

[Sonnie]

I looked at them, but have not investigated them fully.

[justinrlee]

I tried OpenOffice, but I found it takes up a fair bit of memory just idling, especially if you use the quickstart feature (loads when you start windows, sits there eating memory until you run OpenOffice). MS Office seems to just be a lot smoother overall.

Plus, Microsoft OneNote is actually really good for some types of notes, and I've yet to find an open source note program comparable to it.

[epereira]

I would stick with MS Office. I had used OpenOffice a while ago and had some frustration with memeory issues as well.

[fblittle]

nova wrote:

I really hate to admit it but, going to MS has really made things much easier. I'd still be using Open Office today except I could not pass up the Home Use Program offered by MS and my employer. This Home Use Program gave me the complete suite for $20, so I've converted.

You cant beat the Home Use Program Price. I have it also $20 including shipping and you have everything Office offers including Access and Notes.

[Jodean]

you can get office 07 for $105

http://royaldiscount.com/miof20hoands2.html

has word, excel, power point

[nova]

fblittle wrote:

You cant beat the Home Use Program Price. I have it also $20 including shipping and you have everything Office offers including Access and Notes.

I'm really surprised that there are not more people that take advantage of this program. Perhaps there are not that many companies out there that are able to offer it ?

[fblittle]

justinrlee wrote:

Plus, Microsoft OneNote is actually really good for some types of notes, and I've yet to find an open source note program comparable to it.

I have had MS Notes since I loaded MS Office 2007 but did not know what it was. I just tried it and found it to be a very useful program. I am starting to use it more often to collect information in one place. The only negative I have about it at this time is that the table function is not able to do math so I have to import the Excel spreadsheet into ms notes.