- Blog entry posted in 'Uncategorised', May 21, 2008.
While working on the PIC book (now a newsletter JPUG) another member here 3V0 told me about OpenOffice. We needed a good document editor and not everybody can afford the MS Office Suite. Google docs is neat but the word processor made me long for Wordstar :)
Well I downloaded OpenOffice and the more I work with it the more I love it. I've only used Write at the moment but IMO it's superior to MS Word 2003. PDF export built in, auto contour on pictures (I use it in issue #2) and it's just so easy to use. Did I mention it's Word & Excel compatible, cross platform and free?
PS the only thing I found it couldn't do was a complex table (the one in the back of the Junebug manual was too complex to convert) but I'll try drawing it from scratch using OO tools.
If it works goodbye MS Office Suite.
http://www.openoffice.org/
PPS next time it's goodbye Photoshop hello Paint.NET...
Marks256, May 24, 2008
I have been using OO for 2 years now (3 if you count the year i was using both M$ word and OO), and i love it. OpenOffice is great.
Hero999, May 24, 2008
I use OpenOffice at home and MS Office at work. The only think in MS Office I do miss the grammar checker but apart from that it's very good. The only thing is, the drawing package doesn't quite match up to Visio. However Visio is a separate package and OOo isn't supposed to replace it - for drawing there's Inkscape. One thing I like is Impress which is much better than Power Point. I also like the way it does a better job of recovering your documents after a crash (which isn't very often) than MS Office.
theinfamousbob, May 30, 2008
I've been using OO for a few years now; glad you found it. And I don't necessarily agree with Hero999 about the grammar checker; I find that MS butchers the English language at times. I do use the GIMP instead of Photoshop; my school's license is ending for site-wide Photoshop and they're making us buy it or uninstall it. So back to the GIMP until I splurge on something I only need sometimes. And I need to buy Mac and PC copies. But I digress. I'm going to stop by your site and see how awesome this thing turned out. Another victory for freeware!
Hank Fletcher, July 25, 2008
OO was recommended in the latest edition of [I]MoneySense [/I]magazine, along with some other freeware that was reviewed to be as good or better than their commercial counterparts.
Hero999, July 25, 2008
Have you tried it yet? Also please note it's more that freeware it's free and opensource software. I suppose this doesn't matter to most people, other than they can be sure there are no secret bugs calling home.
Hero999, June 28, 2009
3.1 is now out now. It's a pretty major upgrade, lots of new features have been added. Download it now. [url=http://www.openoffice.org/]OpenOffice.org - The Free and Open Productivity Suite[/url]
MixxElectronics, November 15, 2009
Great Blog! I have been using Open Office for about 6 months now and it works great:)
Triode, March 24, 2010
I don't miss the grammar checker, for example try writing "If you have overloaded it it will need replacing" and word will want to change this to "if you break it will need replacing" every time instead of adding a comma.
Hero999, March 25, 2010
Anyone tried Go-OO? It's much better than OpenOffice.org, it's faster, and has improved interoperability with MS Office as other handy features such as being able to import SVG files. [url=http://www.go-oo.org/]Your Office Suite[/url] I've decided that Sun's OpenOffice is rubbish compared to Go-OO which is what it should be. I don't know about the latest version of OpenOffice, but Go-OO has a grammar checker. I don't know how it matches up to MS Office though.
mvs sarma, July 07, 2010
I feel the sizing and the clarity are lacking while using Paint. Of course I never used Photoshop.
#12, December 31, 2010
Been using oo.org for years. Went to go-oo and found the following statement under the tab, "Planet": Go-oo has been made obsolete by the exciting new LibreOffice project. Read their planet here. This confuses me. Please, anybody "in the know" tell me if LibreOffice is the right move to follow this development in open source Office type software. Is go-oo being stopped? Is this just a re-naming? What's up?
mvs sarma, December 31, 2010
Hi Bill, Happy NEW YEAR 2011 and wish you all good health, happiness and prosperity. I shall check the GO-OO issue and come back PS: please see this link, though an year old. it speaks of some issues amongthe developer groups. bla bla... [url=http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/osrc/article.php/3794611/OpenOfficeorg--vs--Go-OO-Cutting--through--the--Gordian--Knot.htm]OpenOffice.org vs. Go-OO: Cutting through the Gordian Knot — Datamation.com[/url]
