What makes OpenOffice.org better?

GenMarshall

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I noticed that this was discussed breafly in "Windows Vista" thread and did not want to thread jack it. Just out of curiosity, what makes OpenOffice.org better than MSOffice? Also, How is it compadible with files saved on MSOffice?
 
Product Description

OpenOffice.org the product is a multi-platform office productivity suite. It includes the key desktop applications, such as a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation manager, and drawing program, with a user interface and feature set similar to other office suites. Sophisticated and flexible, OpenOffice.org also works transparently with a variety of file formats, including those of Microsoft Office.

Available in over 45 supported languages with more being constantly added by the community, OpenOffice.org runs stably and natively on Solaris, Linux (including PPC Linux), Windows, Mac OS X (X11), and numerous other platforms. Our porting page lists the platforms (ports) that OpenOffice.org can run on.

Written in C++ and with documented APIs licensed under the LGPL open-source license, OpenOffice.org allows any knowledgeable developer to benefit from the source. And, because the file format for OpenOffice.org is XML, interoperability is easy, making future development and adoption more certain.

http://www.openoffice.org

Basically, it is an alternative to MS Office (unless you like to pay money, that is). It is fully compatible with Word, Excel, and Powerpoint (I may be forgetting somethings). Also, the file format is in XML like the quote says (notice how Windows Vista will have XML file formats too? ;) ).

I am guessing the support is better for it too (ie; bugs might actually be fixed ;), and you don't have to talk to someone in India to get a solution to a problem). It is a pretty stable bundle. Check out the screenshots, too, to get an idea of it.
 
Hmmm....MSOffice is free for me. :smug:

I've used both. I'm not really fond of OpenOffice, but it's a nice option to have if you don't want to use Office.
 
If I didn't have office or a platform which cannot run office I would use open office. The only downside is that the name "open office" is too similar to open orifice.
 
I have never had good luck with M$ Office. If it's not randomly crashing on me, then it's refusing to open files for no reason. I find OpenOffice much stabler the M$ Office. Also, I don't like having to pay $300 when I can DL OpenOffice (or have it automatically come with Linux) for free.

Furthermore, I can set OpenOffice to "autosave", so every 5 minutes, it automatically saves the file. Word can probably do this, but, well, its too packed with useless and stupid features to be able to find it. OpenOffice has yet to crash, it has yet to refuse to open files. Basically, its free, it works, and its close enough to Word that I can figure out how to use it. Plus its completely compatible with Word. Is it better? Not really, just different, and much, much better value for the money.
 
Open Office has a better spreadsheet I believe. I know that QuattroPro from WordPerfect is not able to make certain graphs (spline). Excel can't either, I believe. Open Office can. But I don't use it because I don't want to uninstall my WordPerfect office nor have two suites.
 
this is another reason. OpenOffice uses an open document format, unlike the proprietary XML-thing that MS uses. that way you're more independant and chances that your documents will be readably by different applications in the future are much higher.

But for me personally, the price was the main argument: I'm not going to pay 300$ for something I can get for free....
 
cierdan said:
Open Office has a better spreadsheet I believe. I know that QuattroPro from WordPerfect is not able to make certain graphs (spline). Excel can't either, I believe. Open Office can. But I don't use it because I don't want to uninstall my WordPerfect office nor have two suites.
I used to use the WordPerfect suite and I still think it's the best of the lot.
 
Comraddict said:
It can save to PDF format..

Actually yes, this is one thing I've found very useful with OpenOffice. I have yet to get Word to save to PDF, but OpenOffice does so easily. PDF is a very convenient way of transporting documents through e-mail and such without them looking different on the other end. Highly convenient.
 
They both have their ups and downs from when I tried them. They are compatible with each other, so the main factor is the $0 price tag for Open Office. In the future when I buy a new computer, I won't pay an extra cent for software besides games, because 99% of it I can get online for free.
 
Right now I just installed it. I am going to have to take a good look at it on how to use it since I am mainly used to using MS Office. Though I am going to make the swich since I am tired of constantly reinstalling MS Office everytime I reinstall windows and always having to put in the code.
 
I got my WordPerfect suite for free ;)

What I've found is that free programs are designed more for "power users." The marketed programs have to appeal to a mass audience and so they leave out features. Case in point: Windows. I had to do a manual edit of the registry to just get the Disk Cleanup to not do a minutes long check for compressing old files when ALL I wanted to do was delete the temporary files ... now it does it in less than a second. Windows and Microsoft still reduced the life of my hard drive until I found out the registry fix (the less you use and access your hard drive, the longer it lives)
 
Goober said:
Actually yes, this is one thing I've found very useful with OpenOffice. I have yet to get Word to save to PDF, but OpenOffice does so easily. PDF is a very convenient way of transporting documents through e-mail and such without them looking different on the other end. Highly convenient.
It's funny that the file size of a Word Doc I converted to PDF in OOo went from 64KB to 196KB. When saved as an .odt file (OOo's file "Word" format) it only takes up 24KB (basically because it is a compressed XML file).
 
CivGeneral said:
Right now I just installed it. I am going to have to take a good look at it on how to use it since I am mainly used to using MS Office. Though I am going to make the swich since I am tired of constantly reinstalling MS Office everytime I reinstall windows and always having to put in the code.

Why do you keep reinstalling windows?

:confused:.
 
Lozzy_Ozzy said:
Why do you keep reinstalling windows?

:confused:.
Because sometimes on a rare event I catch a very bad spyware and it mucks up my windows.
 
Fyi for those wanting to save as pdf files. Check out the PrimoPDF utility: http://www.primopdf.com/ Very neat little thing, shows up as a printer so that you can make a pdf in basically any program that allows you to print.
 
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