Open Office - Microsoft on the Cheap
In my current economic state, I am always looking for a good value. It is good to know that there are many, many people like me around the internet, a fact that is demonstrated by the plethora of Open Source applications floating around the internet. I admire that so many web developers and programmers are willing to devote their time to projects that won’t directly make them money. In the long run, people who work to develop Open Source programs will make a ton of money, but in a kind of inverse-capitalistic way.
I’ve been using Open Office for about a month now, because I cannot afford to upgrade to the brand-new, and terribly confusing MS Office. I’ve found Open Office surprisingly powerful and flexible. OO is a suite of programs intended to replace-or at least replicate-the MS Office Suite. Office has a word processor, presentation software, a spreadsheet program, a database program, and much more. Because my field is writing, I’ve spent most of my time with the word processor, so here’s my take on it.
The strength of the OO Writer program is that it can read nearly any kind of text file, no matter what utility created it. I imagine that, as new text editing programs emerge, OO will add plug-ins enabling the Writer to read them as well. This power makes writer woth its weight in gold. With the Writer, I can import, edit, and save text documents so that they will function in nearly every word processing platform.
One of the drawbacks of Writer that I’ve discovered is that though it can import nearly all text files, sometimes it interprets the special functions within those text files incorrectly. Bullet points, tables, and images in particular at times appear in Writer awkwardly, but with a little adjustment, I have found that I can customize their look fairly easily. This is a design weakness that I really don’t mind a great deal, because I have not had to pay a dime to use Writer.
So, in these trying economic times, maybe instead of upgraded to the fancy new MS Office, you might try an unconventional approach. Try Open Office, and I think that you’ll discover an incredible value at exactly the right price. Have any of you tried OO? What are your thoughts?
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Comments
I experienced the same slowness with Open Office for Mac… I’ll have to try NeoOffice some day. I stuck with Microsoft Office due to those issues of slowness and the UI.
Office 2008 for Mac is more streamlined and has switched into the native Mac UI (as opposed to previous versions of Office), which is nice.
Between iWork and Microsoft Office, though, I have found Microsoft Word to be simpler than Pages; PowerPoint and Keynote are comparable… I haven’t tried iWork Numbers yet… but if you’re going to actually pay for “productivity suite” software, I would sooner recommend Office than iWork. But maybe this is just because I am used to Office.
I had to use OO when my Microsoft Office had a glitch in it. I was happy it had all the regular features, but I found it ran slow too.
I’ve found that OO on a Mac is dreadfully slow and doesn’t use the Mac’s native UI. NeoOffice is built on OO and addresses some of these problems. However, I found that spending the minimal amount and picking up iWork is totally worth it… much faster and intuitive for those working with a Mac and has almost all of the common features of MS Office or OO.