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blueroomelectronics

OpenOffice why use MS Office?

Rating: 1 votes, 4.00 average.
7 Comments
by
blueroomelectronics
on 21st May 2008 at 01:59 PM (1696 Views)
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...

Updated 21st May 2008 at 02:06 PM by blueroomelectronics

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  1. Marks256 - 24th May 2008 01:54 PM
    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.
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  2. Hero999 - 24th May 2008 03:15 PM
    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.
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  3. theinfamousbob - 30th May 2008 05:18 AM
    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!
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  4. Hank Fletcher - 25th July 2008 02:03 PM
    OO was recommended in the latest edition of MoneySense magazine, along with some other freeware that was reviewed to be as good or better than their commercial counterparts.
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  5. Hero999 - 25th July 2008 05:22 PM
    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.
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  6. Hero999 - 28th June 2009 11:50 AM
    3.1 is now out now.

    It's a pretty major upgrade, lots of new features have been added.

    Download it now.
    OpenOffice.org - The Free and Open Productivity Suite
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  7. MixxElectronics - 15th November 2009 09:33 PM
    Great Blog! I have been using Open Office for about 6 months now and it works great
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