Is OpenOffice all it's cracked up to be?

[Whiternoise]

I've been stingy for the last few years using an old copy of Office 2003, which was fine - got the full amazing edition for cheap some years back. When i upgraded the PC, the install went and i had no idea where the disc was.

So, i downloaded OOv3 and i've been using it for the past few months. However, it's only after trying to do some spreadsheet work recently that i've realised that it doesn't seem to be that good. The graphing functions seem very complicated, and it's very difficult to pick multiple data ranges (time consuming as you have to select them one by one). The auto complete options are also a bit wacky, with it not even doing a basic "Jan - 09" "Feb - 09" "Mar - 09" etc along columns, instead just repeating january over and over.

My dad said he had the same problem, Open Office is certainly a good alternative - i can't really fault the word processing package, and the equation editor and things like direct PDF output is handy. But, there are little things that i took for granted when using MS Office that i'm really missing and i think it's time to switch back.. Still, £40 isn't too much

Anyone else tried and succeeded?

[2Cold Scorpio]

Personally, I didn't think so, but I admit to not spending a whole lot of time with it. I personally just really like Microsoft Office, especially Office 2007, and still tell others if you can afford it to get it. I guess I could say, though, that if you're on a budget, OpenOffice isn't a bad way to go. Then again, you can get the Home & Student Edition of Office '07 fairly cheap too.

But that's just my opinion, and I admit to being a bit biased after using Office for about a decade now.

[Saracen]

I've not had that much experience with it. What I did find was some compatibility issues. I built some Excel spreadsheets for a client, who then told me that several of the macros weren't working, and neither was some of the range checking and data validation. It turned out the reason was that despite commissioning it to work under Excel, he decided to use OO instead. After some discussion about the additional cost of finding out what the issues were and getting it fixed under OO, he decided to go back to the original idea and installed Excel instead .... and everything then started working just fine.

And when I find that sort of issue, it makes me nervous about using OO unless that's what the client explicitly wants .... and it usually isn't, at least, for me.

[merdat]

Haven't used it much ,no doubt it's ok but will not be as good as the microsoft stuff that people are used to . Still, Sun Microsystems did a good job at showing what they could produce for nothing when this first came out and I have no doubt that many people benefited and were glad of it over the intervening years.

[synaesthesia]

You get what you pay for tbh, but there's not a huge amount of competition in the "bought" software market for MS's Office unfortunately. And for what you pay for it, OpenOffice is ruddy good, but I find it more ideally suited to home users where advanced use and compatibility problems will rarely if ever be a problem. Otherwise it's fantastic to open those daft powerpoint or excel circulation emails you get and type the odd letter to your bank to tell them to grow up and refund their charges

Office user here though purely as I needed to use macros properly and get to grips with VBA in it, which is a lot easier than OO.

[Gfinch]

It's great for a free program, but not as easy to use as Office. I like it though, I use it in Ubuntu.

[directhex]

Remember that OOo has history - it started life as a paid competitor to MS Office; StarOffice.

A lot of of you are mentioning macros as a core issue - bear in mind that VBA isn't a published spec, so any support for it is a best-effort attempt. However, you might have more luck using a patched version of OOo with extra bits added, rather than the more conservative Sun builds. Try http://go-oo.org/download/ - it's the same version used by most Linux distros

[vmong]

surely all the tech savvy people know about tor**ts?

[adder]

It's brilliant with all free updates as and when they become available. I guess best way to find out if you will like it or not is to try it.

[SiM]

surely all the tech savvy people know about tor**ts?

Its fine to mention the word torrents. OO distribution is a common, legal use of bittorrent protocol.

I found that the spreadsheet software sucked and Word documents written in Word didn't look identical in OO. But the word processor would be fine for new documents. I wouldn't use Calc for anything remotely complicated.

[Haiku32]

It's excellent for basic use of the package. So if all you do is word processing and basic spreadsheets then it works great.

[vicar]

If you are desperate OOo is okay. For basic stuff it's also good. As a free product its okay so long as you can live with the limitations. Office is a better product overall imo.

[Splash]

As others have said it's perfectly fine for just about any non-power user if they're using it to build their own stuff in it, however I've found that opening docs from MS Office in OOo can screw with formatting etc a little. If you're just wanting to view stuff as Word etc then the Office Viewers are another free possibility.

[Sputnik]

As others have said it's perfectly fine for just about any non-power user if they're using it to build their own stuff in it, however I've found that opening docs from MS Office in OOo can screw with formatting etc a little. If you're just wanting to view stuff as Word etc then the Office Viewers are another free possibility.

I found that too and documents I made in OO and saved in word format didn't open with MS Word either.

[aidanjt]

/me prefers KOffice.

I've found OOo to be too unreliable when dealing with MSO documents, and handling MSO format bugs. OOo is also far too bloated for what it does, IMHO.

[Giraffe]

I'd love to try Koffice, but I run Windows. The Cygwin project seems to have stalled, so that's not a route to it.