Openoffice anyone?

[SouthNZoneFan]

Hey guys,

I just read an article about Openoffice and wondering if anyone has used it or is currently using it that can tell me more about it.

I have Office, but wondering if there are any features on Openoffice that I need to download it for.

 

[CardFan67]

Open Office is a great program... It is easy to use and has pretty much all of the bells and whistles that MS Office does... For home use it is just fine or it would probably even be okay for an office that did not have a WAN connection and did not use e-mail or communicate with files to anyone on the outside... Most people don't use it so using it for business and in sending information, such as reports, business quotes, or any other type of information would be fairly difficult.

You can open an existing MS Office file with Open, but you can save into an MS format... At least the last version I tried...

One good thing is it seems to load faster, and operate a little smoother than does MS, but then if you can't use it where you really need to it kind of kills the point...

 

[SouthNZoneFan]

What version are you using, because I heard that MS and Openoffice now are now compatable going both ways...

Am I wrong?

 

[CardFan67]

I have OpenOffice version 1.1.1 I can open any office doc but I can only save in Office 95 or 97... Mostly that is okay but I lose a lot of formatting that way... I use a lot of form functions in MS word and they do not translate through different versions of Office well and they translate even worse through Open...

 

[bratwurst]

You should be able to go either way. At my last job I had one of my techs setup about 20 thin clients for a group of interns we had doing data entry. We wanted to save as much money as possible so we went for some thin clients that pxe booted from a linux server and then they ran open office so I didn't have to pay for the MS office license for them.

They worked on spreadsheets so I am pretty sure that the end product was visible in xls. I don't think we had them save to csv or anything first either.

It might be different with things like powerpoint to openoffice's equivalent, we didn't have them work on that type of stuff.

For the price (free... can't beat that) its a prettty darn good product.

I'm not disputing what CardFan67 said, as he probably has more direct experience with the product than I did, and we did most work with going back and forth with xls spreadsheets, not .doc stuff. One thing openoffice was good for with .doc, was we kept running into people corrupting doc files since there is a bug in office xp that when using markup, sometimes the file would become unreadable except as straight text and then all the formatting was lost. Openoffice could open and fix the file. Pretty cool. Then we just pushed out all the office xp service packs and the problem went away. But in the meantime, openoffice was a lifesaver.

 

[SouthNZoneFan]

Brat - Do you work for the government??? Just messing around. Thanks a lot for your information...

You should be able to go either way. At my last job I had one of my techs setup about 20 thin clients for a group of interns we had doing data entry. We wanted to save as much money as possible so we went for some thin clients that pxe booted from a linux server and then they ran open office so I didn't have to pay for the MS office license for them.

They worked on spreadsheets so I am pretty sure that the end product was visible in xls. I don't think we had them save to csv or anything first either.

It might be different with things like powerpoint to openoffice's equivalent, we didn't have them work on that type of stuff.

For the price (free... can't beat that) its a prettty darn good product.

I'm not disputing what CardFan67 said, as he probably has more direct experience with the product than I did, and we did most work with going back and forth with xls spreadsheets, not .doc stuff. One thing openoffice was good for with .doc, was we kept running into people corrupting doc files since there is a bug in office xp that when using markup, sometimes the file would become unreadable except as straight text and then all the formatting was lost. Openoffice could open and fix the file. Pretty cool. Then we just pushed out all the office xp service packs and the problem went away. But in the meantime, openoffice was a lifesaver.

 

[bratwurst]

Brat - Do you work for the government??? Just messing around. Thanks a lot for your information...

If I worked for the gov't the project would have probably wasted as much tax dollars as possible, so I doubt we would have used openoffice.

I don't work for the gov't, but I do come into contact with people that do a lot in my occupation.

 

[CardFan67]

I'm not disputing what CardFan67 said, as he probably has more direct experience with the product than I did, and we did most work with going back and forth with xls spreadsheets, not .doc stuff.

I need to re state that I love the Open Office product, I think it is great... If it were to catch on everywhere I would be very happy... I also have not had any issues with xls and spreadsheet conversions either way... But I have not really noticed much bugginess between MS versions of the xls files either...

The doc is the only place I have a problem with conversions and it is understandable since many of the MS products can't handle there own documents... I will put together a killer proposal, everything a client would need in it and when I find out they are on 97 or earlier most of my information is lost in their copy... It opens it up and pretty much looks the same but information is missing. The same occurs when I attempted to run Open as my primary....

 

[devilalum]

You can save word docs or PPT presentations in either pdf or flash format using OpenOffice.

 

[SouthNZoneFan]

If I worked for the gov't the project would have probably wasted as much tax dollars as possible, so I doubt we would have used openoffice.

I don't work for the gov't, but I do come into contact with people that do a lot in my occupation.

C - ome on brat. Please tell me and
I - will be so happy.
A -nd then I would know....

 

[SouthNZoneFan]

What if you save it as the RTF?


The doc is the only place I have a problem with conversions and it is understandable since many of the MS products can't handle there own documents... I will put together a killer proposal, everything a client would need in it and when I find out they are on 97 or earlier most of my information is lost in their copy... It opens it up and pretty much looks the same but information is missing. The same occurs when I attempted to run Open as my primary....[/QUOTE]