Open Office?

[Pool Hall Ace]

I have a new computer now (running Windows XP), and I was looking for some business templates that I could store in Excel. The Microsoft website has some, but I was not able to download them (I need Active X controls, blah blah blah, some other gobbledygook I didn't understand). Of course, they also want you to use Internet Explorer.

I did another search and found plenty of sites offering templates, but they aren't free. So I was wondering about Open Office. I was wondering if anyone here used it regularly, or if there were any hitches to it that I wouldn't find out about until after I signed up.

Thanks,
Karen

[RoyGBiv]

1. OpenOffice is good ...

First of all, don't think of it as "signing up." It's free. You download it and install it. If you get a lot of use out of it, you might consider throwing the developers a few dollars to help with future development. If you don't like it, you uninstall it and forget about it.

Second, OpenOffice is essentially a MS Office clone, only it doesn't cost ten brazillion dollars and is missing(*) a few features available in Office. It can read and save in .xls format as well as several other formats, including the emerging Open Document standard. I regularly take Excel spreadsheets I use at work and tweak them in OO at home because I've becoming accustomed to it and find it easier for me to use personally.

(*) Integration across large networks can be a problem, and there are some of what I consider useless "features" in Office that OO didn't both to mess with.

[Pool Hall Ace]

2. Oh! I didn't know that. So I can create a document in

Excel, work in it using Open Office, and then work on it in Excel again? That sounds great. Either way, it sounds like it's worthwhile to download.

Thanks,
Karen

[alcibiades_mystery]

3. Yes, you can

You can do the same with Word and PowerPoint and their OpenOffice counterparts.

[Warpy]

4. Open office is great.

I only use the word processing function, but I have grown to despise MS Word over the years. Open Office got rid of that damn paperclip and it also doesn't insist on reformatting pages and fucking everything up for those of us who do that stuff in our heads and type it out the way we want it, thank you very much.

[RoyGBiv]

5. My biggest gripe ...

My biggest gripe about MS Word is exactly that. It "fixes" things I damn well don't want fixed, all in the name of being "user friendly." Some of that can be turned off, but not all of it easily, and if you work in an office in which you use multiple work stations, as I do, it gets to be a huge pain in the ass to turn all that stuff off on each and every one of them. Plus, when "security" fixes are done, it turns all that crap back on again.

I HATE IT.

My favorite word processor is the old WordPerfect for DOS. I settle for OpenOffice and/or Abiword.

FWIW, you might try Abiword if all you use is the word processor. It's much friendlier to system resources than OO is.

[Warpy]

6. Thanks

I'll check it out eventually. For now, I'm quite pleased with OO.

I'm also glad I'm not the only one who cursed MSWEIRD's user friendly format fuckups. Gawd, I hated that thing.

Wanting to strangle a paperclip made me feel very weird.

[hobbit709]

7. WordPerfect-YAY!!!

I started on WordPerfect 5.0 for DOS and now use 11. I had to generate about 125 forms for my wife to use for the USDA government bean-counter crap at the nonprofit where she works. i would never use Word for that-what a pain. Everyone else at her work only knows how to use Microshaft Orifice and can't even open a .wpd document. Her WordPerfect opens .docs with ease and if they really need one of her forms she does a save as .doc and it looks just fine on their comps. A one page form as a .wpd is 15K in size, as a .doc the same form is 34K-nothing like bloatware. If word converts from .wpd it take a one-page form and turns it into 1 page + about an inch on a second page. If I convert in WordPerfect to a .doc it's still one page. You can open a .xls in WordPerfect and it looks right, you can change the data and save as .xls and it comes up right in Excel-something Excel doesn't even do with its own spreadsheets half the time. Did I mention I hate microshaft applications.