is open office the best free office clone?

[joshwa]

just wondering as i want to install a free office program?

what do you use day to day and are you happy using it without the need to use MS software?

thanks

[njm106]

IMHO yes I would say OpenOffice is the best free office suit, the Writer program is just as good as Word, the Calc program has most of the features of Excel just lacks a VB equivlent and soon there will be a database component similar to Access.

I use OpenOffice on all my machines haven't used MS Office for 6 months now.

[autopilot]

IMHO yes I would say OpenOffice is the best free office suit

I would agree with that. In fact i don't think anything else 'free' comes close.

The only thing i don't like is the spell checker. It's a complete joke. Some of the 'sugestions' are a million miles off the mark.

www.openoffice.org

[joshwa]

cheers i've installed it now

[directhex]

under linux there are several alternatives (koffice, for example)

if you only want a word processor, try abiword (windows etc versions available)

[njm106]

under linux there are several alternatives (koffice, for example)

if you only want a word processor, try abiword (windows etc versions available)

I never really liked koffice, especially compared to OO.

I've not tried Abiword yet though I have heard it is good, would you say it is better than Writer?

[piggeh]

These are the ratings from Jan 05 of Computer Shopper (of the free ones):

602PC Suite 4.1 (4/5)
OpenOffice 1.1.3 (5/5)

Errr, thats it, in the free-range.

Two other ones of note are Ability Office 4 (4/5) and StarOffice 7 (4/5). Both are about £40. All the rest got 3/5 or below (MS Office wasnt rated as it was an article on alternatives)

[oyster]

the new version of Abiword (2.2) is top. I've always liked Abiword because it's fast and light (reminds me of Word 2.0, which was Microsoft's best effort imho), but the new version imports Word tables properly at last!

[directhex]

abiword was one of the only two decent word processors for beos, hence why i know about it

[Kezzer]

I use openoffice, it's a very good package and handles all of the microsoft formats quite nicely.