Open Office 2.0 is available at http://www.openoffice.org
This open source thing is exciting. I’d consider porting over to Open Office but for the fact that I already am so familiar with Microsoft Word. But, wowsy, is it ever a viable alternative.
Same here, I’d switch in a minute if I didn’t have so much time invested in learning MS Office. I’ve gotten several new-computer users on OpenOffice, though, and they love it.
Are files made compatible with Word? Anything I write at home I have to bring up at school.
As far as I know it’s fully compatible with MS Office.
I like Abi Word also. Light weight and can save in HTML, .doc, etc. The nice thing about Open Office, and Abi word, is the number of languages (and spell checks for those languages) that are offered. This is great for some language students. For business support you can always go with Star Office from Sun. One thing that I have found OOo usefully for is opening corrupted .doc files.
Not 100%, but neither is old Microsoft word compatible with new MS word and vice versa. In that way OOo Is much like their own products. I think that it even has some PDF compatibility.
One thing for sure: The “presentation” software is so good, that it makes it hard to see any reason to buy PowerPoint. It imports PowerPoint files, too, and exports to PowerPoint format.
This new version allows you to write directly to PDF.
One thing that the old one didn’t have (although you could program it to do such) was an Access clone. There was a way to use OOo as a front end for My SQL (or other database system) that was useable, but no real support. I wonder if this has changed. I usually do not down load Beta versions, so I haven’t been able to use this version extensively though.
Download it and use it for a while; you can keep Word as a backup
program, if you decide you don’t like Open Office… I found that they
are similar enough to have little learning curve, but you might be
doing more interesting things with Word than I.
The current 2.0 release has these modules:
Base (database)
Calc (spreadsheet)
Draw (graphics. Kinda weird. I don’t get it yet.)
Impress (presentation)
Math
Writer (Word processing)
Cool!
Guess it is time to upgrade.
Yes, GIMP is more intuitive, and I think more powerful.
One of the most nightmarish aspects of Microsoft Word is headers & footers. I do a lot of work on which all I want to do is suppress the running header or footer on a given page. This ought to be simple. As best I’ve been able to tell, what it requires in Word is creating a separate section for any page or pages I want with no headers. Then you have to learn how to prevent the new section from automatically picking up the previous header. It’s horrendous. So, I’m going to see if this is any better in OOo.
NOte to Microsoft (and, yes, you know they’re reading this): Dale’s dream command in Word: “Suppress header/footer on this page.”
Ah.
Dale
From OOo forum
So true. I bet someone on the payroll’s only job is to search the web for Open Office mentions everyday. Try not to “go missing” Dale.
I’d consider Open Office, but then this MSDN Universal Subscription would just go to waste…
I tried downloading it once, back before they split the open source project off from Star Office. Took all night, and still didn’t get downloaded.
There’s an easier way to do it. I’ll PM with instructions.
I switched from MS Office to Open Office and never looked back.
Ver. 2 is a huge improvement over Ver. 1.
Some other good open source software:
Gimp(Graphics) http://www.gimp.org/
HTML Kit (HTML editor) http://www.chami.com/html-kit/
NVU (Web authoring) http://www.nvu.com/
Scribus (DTP- Mac only) http://www.scribus.org.uk/
Mukade
Clearly the guy isn’t at home on the range. That could be a show stopper though.