Sunday, December 30, 2007

Have You Used OpenOffice????

Hello dear readers.

This is a techie question. Have any of you used OpenOffice? The school is trying to move more to it and I would like people's impressions of it.

3 comments:

Toonhead said...

I've used Open Office. I found it to be like an older version of Microsoft Office. The version I used was on par with Office 97 minus the bugs. I found the Open Office version of Excel a bit annoying because I felt the charting function was a bit ass backwards and the chart did not integrate new data very easily.

Anonymous said...

I have been a Microsoft trainer for many years and think OO is a great alternative. It will continue to be refined as more developers work on it, but is already quite user-friendly. And it already has a PDF writer in the word processor -- cool!

Check out Google Docs as another alternative.

BTW, you don't have to "move" to it. The native file format is XML, so it is really just an XML generator. But you can also save in MS formats. It's a tool, not a proprietary environment!

Steve Caldwell said...

I've been using Open Office on my laptop PC since I purchased it 13 months ago (Nov - Jun using Open Office with Win XP, Jun - present using Open Office with Ubuntu Linux).

The word processing program is what I've used mostly -- it's an effective clone of Microsoft Word prior to Office 2007. I've also used presentation program as well for creating workshop materials (text on paper in a large font for an anti-oppression continuum sorting activity).

For the cost, you can't beat Open Office for Windows and Linux. For Mac users, Neo Office is a good choice (a fork that has branched off the original Open Office project that gives you Open Office with a Mac Aqua interface).