Is OpenOffice Open Enough For You?

Probably 90% of people can use it without problems. It is too bad MS continues to obfuscate the standards issue, causing many to remain with their high dollar suite. I recently attended an MS Launch Event where the presenter extolled the virtues of the docx format [and other ***x formats] claiming how they were an open standard. I no sooner got home to my own computer and there was an article about how although these formats were simple zipping of the older formats for less space usage, the underlying formats are still not open. MS continues to show that it does not believe its products can compete openly with other suites on their merit alone.

My children use OpenOffice on their computers as a start of the move to either a flavor of Linux or OS X. I use it whenever possible, only using MS Office when I know another person will need to view the files, rather than printed output.

As for Outlook, whenever someone decides to debug the version of Evolution that is available for Windows there will be even less need for MS Office.

Dear Chris,

After a decade of using Microsoft office products, I switched to OpenOffice about a year ago. I am convinced that, although Msoft Office may be essential to a minority of office application users, Open Office will suffice for the vast majority of users. The Word Processor, Spreadsheet, and Presentation software included in the package are stable, compatible with Msoft office, and entirely sufficient for almost any purpose. An open software product like Evolution can be used to completely replace Outlook, and, if one’s needs are simpler, then perhaps the Thunderbird email software may be all one needs.

Regards,
Karl

Chris,
I OpenOffice’d my laptop (HP ze2015us) a few weeks ago, and I’ve been impressed. Outlook used to be a big part of my life, too. However, I’ve switched to Thunderbird for email, and use the Palm Desktop for scheduling. No major problems yet…I’ve been able to sync both programs with my Tungsten T, and so far, I’m pleased. I’ve had a few minor compatibility issues in Word, mostly fonts, but have been able to resolve those in the last couple of days.

With the cleaner interface, and lower memory footprint, I can’t imagine going back to MS Office anytime soon. I got permission to install OpenOffice on my Gateway desktop where I teach, and no major problems there either. I still use PowerPoint on some projects, but mostly use OpenOffice. It is so much smoother and intuitive.

Customers that do not seem to have office cd’s is part of my business. Since I do not sell software in my repair business, I always carry a copy of Open Office with me and offer it as a replacement. Only on extreme cases such as I had a student writer (college) that required special techniques that my general experience with the program I could not show him how to accomplish a certain task. But in general 9 times out of 10, Open Office works just fine.

Have not used M$ Office for years. If I would miss something it would be Outlook but if you are a Windows user there is Barca and if you are in Linux there is Evolution and Kontact.

I’ve been using Open Office for freelancing for two years now, beginning when I bought a new computer and didn’t want to (a) pony up for a new copy of Microsoft Office or — because I often write for software companies and have some convictions re: intellectual property — (b) re-use install CDs when the same copy of Microsoft Office was running on an ancillary machine.

With a couple of minor glitches, it’s worked fine. For example, I had to download and add a macro to make Ctrl+T work to increase hanging indents (I prefer keyboard shortcuts over mousing), and some borderless graphics in Msoft Word docs come into OO with a border. I simply save as a Microsoft Office file type and the rest of the world is fine with my files.

(So far, by the way, no client has asked for any of the Microsoft features added after Office 2000. This includes mega-major “global enterprises” with pretty sophisticated office software environments.)

There are visual and menu differences, but they are mostly solvable. Several users have written pretty good docs on OpenOffice for Word users, Excel users, etc.

OpenOffice in my experience has a more robust document recovery with fewer crashes to begin with, is faster, and of course is infintely cheaper than Microsoft Office. The OpenOffice forums are superb for instant help, but then so are Microsoft Office’s.

A MAJOR difference is that anyone can open a bug report in OpenOffice and the developers are responsive, often one-on-one with you. Obviously, not everything can be fixed… there’s only so much time and there are limited developers… but you get to see the fix process and everything is open.

In this process, you hear why your idea or concern is ranked the way it is, and you have the option of stirring up the community to vote for it, if the priority is lower than you think it deserves.

HI Chris,

open ofice is cool to replace excell word etc etc but outlook is where the problem is, I use outlook extensivley and have not found anything to replace it with that does it all…
Have a nice day from the sunny caribbean

Frans

As a “non-power” user, I’ve been using Open Office for a few years. Of course I don’t use Outlook. So in my low key, sorta-kinda-maybe pc use, OO has been wonderful on all 7 of my machines including the ones used to sell real estate.
It probably means I’m missing some of the cool stuff that Outlook users can do. Well, I guess I won’t ever know what I missed because I’m competing successfully and communicating successfully. Maybe I’m lucky.or dumb or don’t do much, but anyway maybe it’s like the little ant who builds the hill — he never knows that Everest exists.
Bill

Chris, OO has for years certainly been enough for me, and I’ve never owned MS Office. I’ve used OO professionally to edit a scientific journal where authors usually submit their articles in MSO’s format (.doc). As a biology professor, I exchanged .doc’s with my Office-handcuffed colleagues, and I created the video presentations (”Power Point”) for my lectures. I also currently use OO for the spreadsheets that help me keep track of my Internet empire of 160 websites.

I have used, installed OO on many machines, in fact I stopped buying MSOffice (and convinced many of my friends as well) a couple of years ago and even convinced the suits to allow OO on a number of machines at work, although we only have a few machines that actually need an office suite at our location (a few dozen of the ~400), corporately we have many locations and many, many licences, we have saved a decent amount of money at our particular office and this will creap through to other satelite locations and hopefully to head office in the end. Oh yes, Opera replaces IE and Outlook on these machines as well.

Open Office is huge. It takes forever to load and once it’s finally loaded it sucks up a huge portion of the memory. There’s nothing particularly fancy in it, so I attribute it to lazy coding and code bloat. Of course I could buy a machine with a much faster disk read speed and more memory, but then Open Office wouldn’t exactly be free would it.

I really want to like the damn thing and every couple of months I try it again, but each time I fire it up I’m reminded of how bloated it is, get frustrated with it, and go back to other options.

Evolution is the only app I know of that comes close, and surpasses in some respects. The problem is that the app is so Gnome dependent that I don’t think anyone has succeeded in porting it to windows.

Course, you could, and probably should, go the rest of the way if your switching them from microsoft office, and just switch them right over to a decent linux distro. Something like Sabayon, Freespire, PClinuxos, VectorLinux, etc.

Problem solved.

I definitely find OpenOffice sufficient for my document and very limited spreadsheet needs. It’s great… dies everything I need and is completely compatible. I have it installed on all my PCs, and I love the fact that I’m totally legal!!! I set it up so it saves everything as .doc or .xls files, so I can e-mail attachments that people can open.

I do use Outlook extensively and on my main machine I have my one legal copy of Office 2000 Outlook installed. For everything else, I use OpenOffice.

Of course my fear is that Outlook 2000 will become so outdated that I’ll be backed into a proverbial corner. I really wish OpenOffice or somebody else would come out with software comparable and as good as Outlook.

Fred Olmstead

I guess my biggest concern is VBA support (or rather, the lack thereof). We have several legacy Access applications that make extensive use of VBA, and we have to be able to support them

I’ll be quite honest with you… if it wasn’t for Outlook, I’d have kissed MS Office goodbye at the 1.0 release of OoO.
I’ve been installing it on all my relatives machines for at least a year now, and they’ve had no complaints, not even one! I just make sure and set the default file format to MS because they are still trying to send and open to MS users. It works great!

I love openoffice, and use it exclusively at home, since I couldn’t afford to upgrade every few years to Microsoft’s latest version. The only problems are that I still have to train my wife to save and send attachments as .doc files, since no one seems to understand the native openoffice format, and the lack of an outlook type program that will sync addresses and stuff with my phone. Since I found editgrid to update stock quotes from the web (an excel add-in that I never took the time to figure out in Calc), I don’t even miss excel, which I use all the time at work.
Matt
http://tenshi.ws/2007/01/

We have been using Open Office for about a year now. Three of our PCs have it on it, with 2 having both MS Office and Open Office, the others use MS Office.
There are some differences between the two but they are easy to get used to and the learning curve is easy.
The biggest thing is the .odt extension which you have to change to .doc for PCs without it to read the document. I really like the PDF feature and ‘Free’ is great.

Microsoft Office and Outlook a necessity?

Have not (and will not) use them. Especially will not use that piece of software I renamed Outhouse. For the most part. I try to use nothing that comes close to the Microsoft business model. I prefer to use RTF for most document building. The number of virus problems, are minimal. My first foray into using Outhouse*, swore me off it forever. I know of very few people who are home computerists, that need the horrendous overhead that that garbageware has. Security is the last word in Microsoft. It has not existed for the users in years. I have to tweak and lock my system against intrusions… But delete programs from Microsoft to keep my system “from phoning home.”
*(WordPerfect forced its use, when I was running a small business. The upgrade which forced it, was the last that I used WordPerfect. I lost 4 business months of my time. I also was into a lot of online searching that lead me to learn Outhouse was never going to be ’secure’. As a final note, even WordPerfect could not fix the conversion problem Outhouse created. I had to hand type my entire database since the lockups and destructions caused by Outhouse blew me out of the water so well. Firefox and Thunderbird do me well, and I have never liked IE.)

Emphatic Yes!! Openoffice.org along with free office viewer cover you for all too msofty office formats.

Then there is Google docs and mariyad of other options for word processing..WordPerfect Lightening is free too.

I found the wordprocessor in Open Office didn’t render .doc files exactly the same as the current version of Word.

I’m not sure, however, if any program other than Word will ever render documents made with Word (especially ones with advanced features) exactly the same way Word does. I’m beginning to suspect that MS wants it that way to isolate users of alternative wordprocessors.

A common format for the exchange of office documents would kill MS Office. In fact, businesses ought to do themselves all a favour and adopt Open Office instead of letting MS get rich off of them.

That sounds fanatical, doesn’t it?

You could always build Evolution with Cygwin, one day they may actually release a windows port, though I have not heard any mutterings lately.
John,
Calgary,Canada

nbsp;Openoffice.org is agood alternative to microsoft office.
But it still need some improvements
- Need to reduce the memory usage.
- need to improve microsft office compatibility.
- Need to clean all the Junk in the code. (last clean up almost reduce half of it)
and other improvements.

Please dont forget to report the bugs/ issue and suggestions
http://www.openoffice.org

Or if you have reliable broadband, skip the installation completely, and go for something like Zoho - I’ve tried OO too, and prefer the versatility of an online app. Zoho comes in at the same price as Oo, and adds an Outlook-alike mail application too.

Another thing that is great about OpenOffice - I can run it off of my USB memory stick with U3 software! It’s portable, and works great!

On the downside, documents created in Word don’t always display correctly, especially if you use some of their more sophisticated features (like table of contents based on headings, borders, etc.) but it’s getting better.

[...] In response to Is OpenOffice Open Enough For You?, Gnomie Michael B. Johnson writes: [...]

[...] Well my bud Chris Pirillo wondered the same thing because Ponzi needed some Office apps.  So he installed OpenOffice for her.  He poses this question at the end: Writer, for the most part, is like Word - and Calc, for the most part, is like Excel. That’s all I really need on this laptop. Guess I can kiss Microsoft Office on ancillary machines good-bye? Forget about limited editions and 60-day timeouts, man. I don’t know if I could live my life on the desktop without Microsoft Office at this point (especially with Outlook playing such a pivotal role)… what about you? Source: Is OpenOffice Open Enough For You? ~ Windows Fanatics [...]

[...] We figured we’d throw this out there in case anyone might have any solutions to the question posed here. In another response to Is OpenOffice Open Enough For You?, Gnomie Rodrigo writes: [...]

I have been installing OOO on all of my friends and relatives machines for years. They don’t even know they aren’t using M$ office. 2 caveats

1 set the defaults to rtf or doc for documents , xls for spreadsheets and ppt for presentations of they will not be able to share docs with M$ users.

2. Get the Novell version — it imports docx files

As for M$ documents not rendering correctly on OOO, the don’t render the same on another M$ Word installation in many cases either. (I taught a course in M$ office and half the class got one tesult and the other half another).

Another advandage of OOO calc is that it’s much more user friendly. Excel often bullies you with their helps and defaults which cause more work than they the help with.