Documents » Word & Office Suites:

Once you get used to the different look and feel, you can do just about anything the average M$ Office user can do… but for free. The boss says I have to have M$ Office on the work machine… but he didn’t say I have to USE it. I have openoffice on the work machine and have no trouble exchanging files with others in a 100% windows environment.

Very nice alternative to MS Office.

With Open Office I really don’t understand why MS Office continues to sell. Not only does it do virtually everything MSO does, it also allows quick creation of PDF documents, bidirectional functionality with Googledocs, web publishing tools and adds robust database and calculation software. To be fair, there are some things missing in Open Office including grammar check (which can be added on) but compared side to side, it’s a wash for features. The free price tag puts this software on top. This sorely overlooked and continuously improving software should be the standard office suite. It’s been mine going on 5 years now.

With support for Microsoft Office Documents.. there is no reason why people shouldn’t switch to Open office.

An ideal reaplacement for Microsoft Office (Word, Powerpoint, Excel, etc.). OpenOffice can easily read, edit, and write Microsoft Office documents, without the cost. The look and feel is very similar, and it is capable of doing all the same tasks.

The only reason people are still buying Office is that they aren’t aware of the alternative.

OpenOffice.org is really fantastic. As a small business owner, I’d rather not spend hundreds and hundreds of dollars on M$ Office. I found out about Open Office randomly and decided to give it a try.

The interface and user controls are simple for anyone trained on Microsoft’s Office suite. The downside is the limited availability of templates (which M$’s product is rich with). However, there is an import tool for M$ templates and you can always create your own.

OpenOffice can output in myriad formats and one that’s truly wonderful (because it’s system neutral–maintaining perfect formatting on all systems) is PDF.

I mainly use Writer (the equivalent to MS Word), and Calc (Excel).

Writer is capable of creating indexes and other amazing feats. It’s pretty feature rich and version 3.0 is wonderful.

Calc is excellent as well, using the same conventions as Excel for data input, functions, and calculations. There is an “analysis toolpak” add-in for Excel that I miss (advanced statistical analysis). Calc won’t be replacing M$ Excel or Minitab for the scientific or financial community anytime soon, but it’s pretty darn robust. With the nature of open source software, perhaps you can write your own statistical analysis package.

Base is intuitive, having most of the same controls and layouts as Access.

For free, I have no complaints. I will certainly be donating some cash to this project for the further development and advertising of the product. I’m a big fan of the ODF file format. Kudos to all of the corporate supporters of this great suite.