Replying to OpenOffice Or Microsoft ?

xboxrulz, you can save your openoffice.org documents as Microsoft DOCs. Did you use the OOo format just because you're a sadist?

I swapped fully to OpenOffice during spring of 2005. Yet, not until last month did I switched all documents to the new Open Document Text format. *This forced my classmates to get OpenOffice in order to read the notes that I typed, evil scheme, eh?*

xboxrulz

MS Office is vastly superior to any other suite, however, for general home use I think open office is more than adaquate.

MS Office is much more business aligned, being so powerful it is ideal for business, but here at home I use open office.

I hate that program. I hate computerized slide shows in general, but Power Point must be blamed because it has turned an entire generation of boring people into boring people who can easily share waaay too many details about things nobody cares about.

Right on! Half of the lecturers in my College use Powerpoint and it's so hard to stay awake in such classes. I wish they would do it the old fashioned way ... writing on the board with chalk . We even have to study for our exams from the same slides .

I've always really liked Microsoft's office products. I'm a huge fan of 2003, mainly because it's the latest version that I have (been using it for a year or so now) and it's only given me problems once. (I blame the old computer that I was using for said problems, as the exact same install works on all the systems I've used since.)

It's easy to use ... no learning curve when I go to the public PC labs here on my campus (they all include Office suites) ... and, for me at least, a legal full-license copy was dirt cheap.

But, if I had to pay full retail price for the suite, I would probably just go with Word and find some other, cheaper programs for spreadsheets and such.

And I never, EVER use PowerPoint, so it's not important to me. (I hate that program. I hate computerized slide shows in general, but Power Point must be blamed because it has turned an entire generation of boring people into boring people who can easily share waaay too many details about things nobody cares about. Stupid Power Point for encouraging vacation photos and twenty-slide presentations about toilet paper.)

I don't think the "quote" button works anymore.

No problem with the quote button now.
I was disappointed with OpenOffice. When interacting with people using Microsoft Word, the layout of the document change, the polices change, and when you add things the original authors feel you messed up their nice documents with your ugli addons.
Moreover, starting up Microsoft word needs a reasonable time on my system, starting OpenOffice needs a lot of time.
So, I definitively switch to abiword for my own usage.
I use Microsoft Word viewer (free) for reading the Microsoft documents, and I use abiword (very small and also free) for writing my own ones, in a way which is compatible with Microsoft word, even if the page layout seems different.
So, I open my collegue document, view it, and I write my own document saying "on page 3 add the following line".

I don't think the "quote" button works anymore.

Anyways, some of you guys keep referring to OpenOffice.org's competition with Microsoft. Keep in mind that it is NOT a competition in the market sense of the word. Nobody is profitting financially from OOo. Microsoft is the only party with anything to lose, here.

Somebody else mentioned that there are no other word processors for Linux. This is untrue. I'm sure there are several other popular word processors, and a host of other word processors that nobody cares about.

Personally, I use OpenOffice.org, having switched a few years ago from Microsoft Office. I was especially impressed with OOo's PDF exportation. OOo lacks in a few areas, however. It doesn't have a grammar checker. When I composed essays in French or Spanish, I used Word's grammar checker to help me find errors. This is not an option in OOo, however. Not even in English. Another feature I appreciated in Word was the auto-recover feature. OOo doesn't have this, either.

All that having been said, OOo v. 2.0 is supposed to have a lot of new useful features. And though I haven't checked, someone told me that it will have grammar checkers.

i'm not sure, i had a bad experience with openoffice once and since i've always used Microsoft Office (even as a kid) i'll have to stick with that... i don't know if im just stubborn or what....

I use MS Office at school, as it is the only option. However, at home I use OpenOffice, although I own a copy of MS Office XP. When I found OpenOffice, I figured I'd use it untill I found reason to go back to MS Office. So far, I havn't found a reason.

I'm kinda at conflict with this particular issue. I am currently an MCP (Microsoft Certified Professional), and am studying for my MCSA and MCSE. I also have a decade of experiance developing for Windows platforms. So yea, you could say I'm a Microsoft guy.

However, I am also a supporter of the open source community, and as such recomend open source software over paid software. Heh, in fact over the past two days I have recomended OpenOffice to one person on this forum, and a whole classroom full of people at my school, as well as my instructor.

Odd thing is, I always save in MSO .DOC format, just in case I ever do go back to MS Office.

I suppose the main thing that Open Office has over MS Office is that it's cross-platform. That's a huge selling point at school, as half the people in the networking class use *NIX and variants.

Quick OT comment: Closed-source OSes are generaly better in the security department because potential hackers can't just browse the source looking for vulnerabilities.

QBRADQ

Better as in what? Userfriendlyness, maybe, but that depends, most people just want ready-to-go-and-understand-it-at-first-run software GUI's, some other people go for quality and are motivated enough to learn how to use the less userfriendlier GUI'ed software, which is usually faster (if less graphical), or has more advanced options.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

well, you might be right, as i only spent a few days with openoffice. maybe it's just being familiar with M$ and all, but everything from the viewing on screen to the commands, format, and menus seems so much easier in office. like i said, thogh, i'm not stuck on office, and will install both programs on my dual-boot system.