Stop Microsoft
Miscellaneous => Applications => Topic started by: anphanax on 23 November 2005, 18:57
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I highly recommend anyone here who hasn't tried OpenOffice.org 2.0, to download it and give it a try. I wasn't that impressed with OO 1.x, but 2.0 is looking very good.
Pros:
* People using MS Office can feel at home about certian things (toolbars are more MS Office 2k3-ish than the OO.Org 1.x ones).
* Macro support looks good. Objects can be assigned names, and easily converted to other types of objects.
* You can insert JAVA APPLETS in your document, as well as OLE junk.
* The new "Base" program is great. I was able to hook it up to a MySQL database quite easily, and it also supports it's own local DB format. Very impressive to me.
* The thing's help system is coming along very nicely.
* It can export to PDF (which I'm pretty sure 1.x could do too).
* It's not a blantant rip-off of MS Office. It's dialogs are not the same as those in Office, although they're still easy to use. You can figure out how to change line spacing using the Paragraph Styles dialog quite easily, by going to the Idents and Spacing tab. If you still disagree, go to View and Toolbars.
* If you've ever used the Format Painter in MS Office, it works the exact same way for OO.Org, no suprises :).
* Writer has a FORMULA BAR!
* Find/Replace supports Regular Expressions.
* Almost every program allows you to turn on a Grid (useful in Impress and Draw, in particular).
* Every "custom animation" and "slide transation" you might expect from Office 2k3 seems to be supported in Impress.
* Table creation drop-down button is more useful in OO.org than in MS Office (it grows to support more than just 4 x 5 tables).
* It's FREE :).
* Mail Merge in Writer IS supported via the Tools menu.
* It appears to be licensed under the LGPL, not the GPL (I prefer the LGPL since it's less strict).
* I actually recognize the font names in 2.0.
* Export support provided by the Applications is good.
* I prefer Save/Discard over Yes/No/Cancel (MS Office), when closing the program with work I haven't saved.
* The color bar in Impress/Draw makes re-coloring shape elements a snap.
* I can insert animated images, and edit the animations.
Cons:
* Can't figure out a way to view the motion paths assigned in Impress (the PowerPoint equivalent).
* Heard complaints regarding Access support in "Base".
* Where is the clipart? I am aware certian people HATE clipart, but there is a segment of people out there who really like it. Sure, someone could buy one of those CDs packed with WMF/EMF/JPEG/GIF (if you really hate GIF, just convert it to PNG)/BMP files. I don't think the average user likes that though. They want things to just work :P.
* Seems to be missing the pen you can draw tables with that exists in MS Office (maybe a patent issue there?).
I wonder if the fact that the OO.org team "caught up" with MS is why they decided to change the interface Office uses...
EDIT: I see other people share a similar opinion that I do.
When 1.1.3 came out, I gave it a try and almost immediately went back to using Office XP. Since using 2.0, I have no plans of going back to MS Office again. If you're looking a free alternative to MS Office, OO.org 2.0 is definetly the way to go.
its only 90mg and its worth it.
I just updated to 2.0, and let me say:
It's freaking awesome.
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Still waiting for the Dutch version :(
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And I'm waiting for the native Mac version, even if that's NeoOffice/J. Until then, I shall stay with AbiWord and MS Office 2004.
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i agree, ooo2 far surpasses ms office. most of my customers who try it out ditch office or just dont buy it. we install it for free, along w/ mozilla.
is there an exchange client alternative? i admit that i have not really looked for one
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I think OpenOffice was superior to M$ office ever since version 1.0.0, at least I haven't needed to use any M$ Office product since then. But, yeah Ooo 2.0 is way beyond anything M$ will ever produce.
P.S. If you have problems with Ooo 2.0 on Fedora ... that's probably cuz the Fedora version is fucked ... download the real Ooo 2.0 at their site and the problems will go away ... this happened to me
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Oo is the only office product that competes with MS Office.
Anyone who uses oo would download Ms office if they could get if for free.
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I use OpenOffice and but I agree with Pathos, MS Office is superiour and for me (and many other people) it's about value for money more than anything else. Personally I'd rather use an inferiour product if it does what I want - it's about quality vs cost and OpenOffice winns on this as far as I'm concerned.
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Oo is the only office product that competes with MS Office.
Anyone who uses oo would download Ms office if they could get if for free.
Bullshit !!! I would never fucking download that shit !!! I have an M$ office CD right here in my closet it came with my computer ... but I never used it (except once) ... why ? Because it's complete shit ! Word and Excel crash every 5 min. no matter what I tried to do to fix them, they don't do what you ask of them, even very simple requests, they 'run out of system memory' cuz they are such a bunch of fucking resource hogs !!! There is absolutely no reason for me to choose M$ Office over Ooo. If Bill Gates (or anyone) came to my house and offered me a completely free version of M$ Office I would tell them to shove it up their ass !!! :mad:
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Oo is the only office product that competes with MS Office.
Anyone who uses oo would download Ms office if they could get if for free.
HAHA I meant to say wouldn't ...
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Open Office 2.0 is awesome. Open Office > MS Word
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HAHA I meant to say wouldn't ...
Ohhhh ... oops, uhhh ... then you'd be right :thumbup:
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is there an exchange client alternative? i admit that i have not really looked for one
Ximian Evolution
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I use OpenOffice and but I agree with Pathos, MS Office is superiour and for me (and many other people) it's about value for money more than anything else. Personally I'd rather use an inferiour product if it does what I want - it's about quality vs cost and OpenOffice winns on this as far as I'm concerned.
Just for the record I was playing devil's incarnate when I said this, my true oppinion is that MS Office is equal to OpenOffice 2.0 in quality but it's much better because it's free.
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you were playing Devil's Advocate.
devil incarnate is something totally different. I'm pretty sure nobody has ever played devil incarnate on Microsuck (although some smartass will probably crack wise about this any second now).
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and here is an article about why you shouldn't use OpenOffice: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=120
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and here is an article about why you shouldn't use OpenOffice: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=120
Perhaps.
But consider the possibility that OpenOffice behaves that way for a reason. And that some blogger has no interest in knowing why. I'm sure his results had to do with the fact that he is running OO on a Windows machine. Microsoft, of course, has all the inside scoops on memory management, object/process sharing between Windows and Word, and all the other goodies that no one can duplicate without being in serious copyright violation. OpenOffice kinda has to guess at all that stuff, because it is not available to developers, especially developers of a competing product. If OO had the same Windows performance as MSO, you'd see a lawsuit.
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Perhaps.
But consider the possibility that OpenOffice behaves that way for a reason. And that some blogger has no interest in knowing why. I'm sure his results had to do with the fact that he is running OO on a Windows machine.
AbiWord on Windows is at least as fast as Word.
Microsoft, of course, has all the inside scoops on memory management, object/process sharing between Windows and Word, and all the other goodies that no one can duplicate without being in serious copyright violation. OpenOffice kinda has to guess at all that stuff, because it is not available to developers, especially developers of a competing product. If OO had the same Windows performance as MSO, you'd see a lawsuit.
Windows has memory management? ;)
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Okay, I tried it.
It's still crap.
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I have mixed veiws on OpenOffice.
It does use more RAM than MS Office but it isn't as bloated - you can't say and 86MB download is bigger than the MS Office CD. If uses more memory because it packs the spreadsheet, drawing and word processor into one big fat soffice.bin file. This is a bad design choice in my oppinion but it might be faster then MS Office under certain circumstances like if you loaded all the OO programs and MS Office programs - I bet you OpenOffice would them use less. As far as features go OO is equal to MS Office in my oppinion which is what I'm mostly judging this on and of course value for money which OO also wins on.
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I have a badarse fucking computer, I dont care if it uses 500mb of ram and 100gbs of hard drive space.
It still lacks a zillion features MS Office has, the spelling/grammar check isn't near as good (let alone appear to be even turned on in OOo 2.0). Along with that I find it very difficult to do things like change the spellcheck dictionary because its designed by morons interface wise.
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I have a badarse fucking computer, I dont care if it uses 500mb of ram and 100gbs of hard drive space.
It still lacks a zillion features MS Office has, the spelling/grammar check isn't near as good (let alone appear to be even turned on in OOo 2.0). Along with that I find it very difficult to do things like change the spellcheck dictionary because its designed by morons interface wise.
I've only tried the RC2 version, and I figured the spellingschecker was only bad in the beta version.
The spellingschecker in MS Office is lightyears ahead, you can easily switch between languages and it also checks on grammer.