Does anyone run Open Office software?

[knvfqokne]

I was curious what the general opinion was about Open Office software?

Some people that I spoke with like it, and thought it was a good idea to exit MS.

Thanks for any opinions.

Michael
www.greasewheel.com

[OldJack]

I like it....

The only reason i dont really use it is because every client i deal with uses MS products.

I have it installed. You can save in MS formats so thats not an issue. I don't use it much because I have a recent version of MS Office. Just something else to learn. I would definitely cut over to it before paying the money for MS Office when I need to upgrade. All the excel macros etc I tried from searches online worked on open office as well.

So it is compatible?
I dumped every office product when I dumped Outlook 2007, and I'm not going back.
Is this a good alternative?

Originally Posted by eborg9

So it is compatible?
I dumped every office product when I dumped Outlook 2007, and I'm not going back.
Is this a good alternative?

I only spot checked it Eborg, but I know very knowledgeable people who say it is 100% compatible and like it a lot. The only thing is if you want to save in word format etc, you need to select that. You can probably set up defaults though.

My experience with other open source stuff like thunderbird and FF is they more effort to set up, but well worth the effort in the end.

Then next thing I'm going to play with is the reminder add on for Thunderbird. I have yet to install IE7, although I need to do that to test for cross browser compatability. Probably stick it on my wifes laptop

I still use win 2k BTW and have yet to see a reason to upgrade.

[mwasser]

I have it on a couple of Mac computers. I would say it is 99% compatible. We do a lot of documents that are hundreds of pages with lots of graphics, charts, etc. Sometimes the formatting is not exact and that is a pain. For any normal use - letters, contracts, reports that are only text, etc. it is no problem at all. The biggest problem we have had is with our newsletters which used templates from Microsoft word. The margins would be slightly off when opened in Open Office.

Using the spreadsheet program, we have had 100% compatibility. You can save everything as an office document, so that is no problem.

I've tried using the spreadsheet for editing 2,000 to 3,000 item shopping cart databases. It might have been garbage in; garbage out, but I could not get the csv files to import correctly, while Excel does OK, just have to make sure to "format" the money columns to 2 decimals before saving with Excel.

I'm going to try again, I haven't removed it. Just not enough hours in the day.....

I know someone who uses it extensively and loves it. I tried it for a while without problems, but didn't give it a thorough test.

[jukloinoo]

We use it exclusively across three offices and we have never had an issue with compatibility. One our staff starts using it they forget that MS exists. Its a great resource and you don't need to feel like you are compromising quality of application for price.