There seem to be valid reasons to use OpenOffice. The main reason can be that it is for free. OpenOffice seems to work and operate almost completely like Windows Word. While Windows Word is a text editor that has to be paid for. And in comparision to other programs and computer parts it can be considered that Windows Office and Word are expensive.

The outcome and the results of pieces of work, text, forms and letters seem to be almost the same like Windows Office Word.
Maybe people think that software that is available for free has a less quality compared to expensive software?

Almost similar topics to this one are pretty old.
So to avoid the accusation of posting in old topics a new topic is created.
The old topics can be found here and there.

I guess I don't understand the business model for Oracle/OpenOffice. Open office is apparently now owned by a company, but how can it still be produced for free?

I use OpenOffice I find it very similar to Microsoft Office which is very convenient for most users who tend to alternate between the two programs. I have OpenOffice on my thumbdrive with PortableApps and use it when I am using a computer that does not have Microsoft Office installed. I believe that OpenOffice can almost perform on par with Microsoft Office with a few updates but other than that, it is a GREAT alternative.

Open Office is like a double edged sword with me. For starters, I'm running Ubuntu and Open Office is convenient enough to use. However, I've had some issues with formatting. For instance, I was working on my resume and I was tying up loose ends. I saved it as a .doc file just in case I wanted to open it on another machine. I closed Open Office but about 5 seconds later, I realized that I had forgotten to print it out. So I had to reopen it. When I opened the document containing my resume, I was sorely disappointed that most if not all of the formatting had been lost. The column widths were different and the spacing between rows had changed.

So I thought, "Probably just a 1 time thing". So I fixed up my resume again and this time, I saved my document with 5 different extensions. I closed/reopened Open Office. Now this is the part that just gets me: every single file had lost some sort of formatting, whether it be the font or the spacing. I repeated this process a few times and it seems to finally be working. I don't want to jinx it or anything. I exported it to a .pdf just in case I need to print it.

Nobody in particular owns OpenOffice.org since it's open-source, thus owned by everybody in the whole world.

But particularly you're right, it seems that OOo isn't moving forward as it was before, I've read that Sun wanted a patent for it in America, but they were rejected as OOs can't have such a patent or something like that, I'm not a lawyer to know it.

Usually everything what Oracle buys starts to be gigantic and unusable, just look how big the installer got of VirtualBox when you compare it to the previous versions, even though not a lot have changed.

I doubt OpenOffice will be paid, unless it will split to several projects, which at least one of them will be free. ;D

Yikes Even though I'm not an OO user nyself, I'd hate to see any part of it go proprietary. I hope the fact that oracle's logo is on it isn't an indication of anything.

I like Open Office. I have used it quite a bit in the past.

I don't feel that the quality of Open Office is bad at all, it has pretty much all the functionality that Microsoft Office has along with extras. Being open source various programmers around the world have added new features the way they feel they need to be implemented into the software.

Another good point of Open Office is that it supports the new Microsoft Office 2007 / 2010 file formats, (Docx, pptx and xlsx etc). In my opinion, the slideshow software and spreadsheet software (The Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Powerpoint equivalent programs) are just as good as the Microsoft Office versions except a lot cheaper (Free!).

In addition to the above, Open Office also supports many other operating systems including Linux which Microsoft Office on it's own doesn't. With Microsoft Office you have to use the wine emulator inside linux to emulate a windows session which isn't as good as running the software without any prerequisites.

I can't see Open Office going down the paid route to be honest as I feel many people would switch over to Microsoft Office as it is more common in businesses, schools, colleges, universitiies etc so computer users would use the software that they are used to. Don't forget that a lot of people only use open office because it's free!

We will have to see what the future has in store for open office.

You will get no accusation of posting in old topic.
Posting in an old topic is better than opening a new thread saying the same thing than the old topic.
If you can add bring something new in addition to an old topic, you are welcome adding your content to the old topic. If you cannot bring anything new, no reason to open a new topic on an old subject.

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