Open Office just can't compete. It doesn't surprise me that organisations are going with the cheap option with no regard for the people it would most affect (the administrative folks who make their documents look good and the number crunchers who spreadsheet their results into perspective). Moreover, you get into horrid compatibility problems - I'm still converting .docx to .doc for some of our agents, even though MS has had a tool to do that since Office 2007 was released.
I will inform our staff that what they've been doing for eight years with OO doesn't look good. I'm sure they will be surprised. There are NO compatibility problems. All of our work generated with OO works great with OO. It is Office where the compatibility problems lie. Office documents just aren't compatible with anything else and we constantly have to fix them to work in OO. See what I mean?
If you have the money I would say Microsoft but if you don't have the money or don't want to fork it out. Open office will serve its purpose.
We have the money. But we're smart enough to know OO does everything we need and we don't have to pay Microsoft for features we'll never use. Unlike DP posters who fork over hundreds of dollars cause Microsoft told them what to do so they did it.
I get a "calendar" emailed to me every year by someone who doesn't know how to use tables in Word... the moment you try to add your own info to it it totally screws up. I would suspect that 90% of Word Users wouldn't know what 50% of the features can do for them, let alone how to use them. I use OO and for the types of documents I need to generate its more than enough - its like Word before they decided to screw up the menus and navigation. I have used Word and VBA to do funky stuff in the past and enjoy using it with Excel but the requirements are few and far between. I have only needed a macro in OO once and I've been using it for a couple of years now. My kids get a bit sniffy about PowerPoint and I could point them in the right direction but instead I let them queue up for their Dad's PC and leave mine unaffected by their awful downloads and bloated documents.
Last I checked I can do much more with OO than I can winpoop. Including merely opening stuff. You may want to try using it before you make such claims. N.
Undoubtedly, many users of computers know that Microsoft Office, like Windows, are paid products for which should be given a lot of money. Nevertheless, domestic users are still very rarely think about what the software that comes directly from their PC, this is bigger than the PC. But the main advantage of OpenOffice to Microsoft Office is its cross-platform. This package runs on all popular platforms, in particular, under Windows, Linux and MacOS.
Agree totally, I always opt for opensource before paying as the majority of the time, they are much more reliable, you get all the updates free and if it breaks you have not lost anything
Open office is good but Microsoft office is much bettter because of its features. MS office is easy to learn & to work.
Open office is nothing compared to MS office. Open office is certainly the best free alternative, rather the only mentionable one.
Open Office is free. It’s updates is also free. With a help of open-source code you can adapt Open Office to your needs, Microsoft doesn’t offer anything comparable. Microsoft depends on the sales of Office and it’s other software to remain profitable. Open Office is not solely dependent on its current crop of developers and current corporate sponsor. Open-source has code beyond a company. While OpenOffice can also read and write Microsoft files like Word's .doc and Excel's .xls, these are not its default file types.
If you can go for MS Office, it will give you more features than OO as well as the support. If you cant afford for software, Go for OO.