OpenOffice

[voidmain]

I am certainly no fan of the Microsoft lover magazine known as PC Magazine.  But that fruit cake John C. Dvorak sometimes comes up with some good ones. Here is a nice one about OpenOffice.org 1.0:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,427069,00.asp

[creedon]

quote:Originally posted by VoidMain:
I am certainly no fan of the Microsoft lover magazine known as PC Magazine.  But that fruit cake John C. Dvorak sometimes comes up with some good ones. Here is a nice one about OpenOffice.org 1.0:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,427069,00.asp

I agree; I'm using OpenOffice 1.03 in Debian 3.0; I guess I don't have to worry about Microsoft's little coding tricks, Huh?
OpenOffice is a really good application, it seems to do everything I require of an office suite, and it's open source; that alone makes it better than anything closed source.

[Refalm]

The only thing I've seen OpenOffice.org Write lacking so far, is a minor selection of tables and no Dutch spelling-checker support (OpenOffice.org itself is completely in Dutch).

[Calum]

i am having some problems with openoffice.org 1.0. I got the fonts to work, after a couple of false starts, and got it to install as proper network/client stuff too, but it seems not to be able to do complicated M$office2000 .doc files too well (these are ones with text boxes and tables and all that crap) HOWEVER i am using 1.0 which is a few months old. Is it worth a download of whatever the newest one is (for linux this is)? (bearing in mind i dial up?)
Sorry, this was off topic, but this thread is just callled 'openoffice' after all....

oh yes, and re: the article:
Rather thin on actual facts, and it is written from the point of view of "how can the marvellous Microsoft beat this open source upstart?", However, i think that it is by and large, on the money...
Onward the revolution, i say!  

[ August 10, 2002: Message edited by: Calum ]

[dbl221]

A software developer at M$ once told me that "eventually thay will through
enough man hours at open-source and then M$ is toast"

Lets hope he is right.

As the quality and quantity of available apps for
linux increases we will see more and more linux
users world-wide.  Add to that the M$ dirty tricks
and business folks will eventually have a valid reason
to switch desktops to linux.

[smokey]

Even KOffice wich comes with KDE is pretty reasonable. Staroffice is good *except* for the start bar - they lifted this straight from windows complete with dialogues and the "run" command  

[lazygamer]

quote:The final possibility is that the OpenOffice folks themselves will flake out and begin to make too many updates for every little bug or start splintering into competing entities with random versions of the software and thus lose focus. Most companies that have tried to compete with Microsoft ended up shooting themselves in the foot with no help from Microsoft.

Now that seems a little too unlikely. People are always talking about how Linux is not competing with Wind0ze good enough etc. They forget that Linux doesn't need to be bought at the store to survive.

I fail to see how this article is thin on facts, even if he's pro MS, he's admitting many flaws with MS.