Today I got my Maximum PC magazine and I found this in the Fun Size News section:


I guess you can also count me as a person with "limited needs" too. OpenOffice is my primary office suite with Office XP as a secondary.

Wow... Microsoft sucks. I'm glad I primarly use Linux...

[N]F

lol, I use mainly OpenOffice too. 100% OpenSource 100% freedom!

xboxrulz

I don't think Microsoft Office XP provides anything really revolutionary or the so called 2006 era features. OpenOffice is great for your day to day regular editing.

I'm just hoping MS leans more towards using Open Document Formats for their documents instead of all this proprietary document means.

I use OpenOffice, but for better portability I turn my documents into PDF, don't worry, with the compression techniques I use on it, it is sometimes comparably smaller than any MS Document, though that's not using compression techniques on the MS Document (if there is any?).

OpenOffice does what I need it to do, if it didn't I wouldn't use it. I don't really care about the features MS Office has, I probably would have only used 10% of those features. I wonder how well MS knows their product and if they could tell the difference from an MS Office produced document and an OpenOffice produced document.

Cheers,


MC

MSOffice is crammed with features that nobody uses or even bother to know about. I am using both openoffice and msoffice for last 2 years and didnt find any great advantage using msoffice. I have not used majority of the features in msofice and even dont know what they are for. Guess I too can count myself in limited needs catagory. Fortunately this catagory seems to be very large and more than 90 % of the office suite users will fall in this.
What I dont understand is why microsoft is adding useless features and making it bulkier instead of focusing on making it leaner and faster. I think the same logic applies for windows OS too.

I use Openoffice all the time (except when I have to submit a doc file, that's when I open it in MS-Office just to make sure the layout is fine). As far as my requirements go, it's just great. Of course, anyone who has used MS-Office will definitely have no problem using OpenOffice at all. Because, from the looks of it, both OpenOffice Write and Math have many features that are there in MS-Office and most of them in similar places. For example, if you've ever tried to sort data in Math according to a particular column, it looks just like MS-Office, even found under the same menu (Data -> Sort).

But, I just feel that OpenOffice has quite some way to go before it gets accepted as anything other than a free (and very good) clone of MS-Office.

M$ hates it? I'm not suprised. It's in the human (or company) nature to hate rivals that stand out more. Microsoft Office is rather normal, but something that is good as M$ Office and free at the same time cannot be hidden. And this is a proof that more expensive doesn't always mean better.

WoW, you Didn't know before?, Microsoft hates even itself , it was noticed before from the behaviour of microsoft anti-spyware product and the new product windows defender, each one of them treats the other as a threat, lol, they hates eachother

QUOTE(mastercomputers @ Mar 31 2006, 08:58 AM)

I'm just hoping MS leans more towards using Open Document Formats for their documents instead of all this proprietary document means.

I use OpenOffice, but for better portability I turn my documents into PDF, don't worry, with the compression techniques I use on it, it is sometimes comparably smaller than any MS Document, though that's not using compression techniques on the MS Document (if there is any?).

Cheers,
MC

mastercomputers, what is compression techniques you use?, i'm creating pdf files using adobe acrobat pro 6, but always it creates a big file, how to compress it?, i always need to convert all my docs into pdf for better portabillity but this problem costs me so much space and bandwidth always.

Hey XIII,

Well I assume you use Windows, I use Linux myself and a tool called ps2pdf (I think it's available for Windows too), in which the file I write first, is a postscript file (.ps extension), then I convert to a pdf from their, the default values of ps2pdf is enough, e.g. UseFlateCompression=true and CompressPages=true. What ps2pdf is suppose to do is create compatible Adobe PDF files, it succeeds in my case.

If I'm using OpenOffice, I export the document as a PDF, open it in a PostScript editor then save it as a ps, then use the ps2pdf command. It turned my 500KB file into ~50KB compressing it 90%, I even tested it by emailing it to people and seeing how it would look on their computers, it appeared exactly how it should have, though I must admit I don't splash documents around with too many fonts that would not be available across different systems otherwise embedding fonts would increase the filesize but it did have borders and font formatting, which remained perfect.

The reason I came about this, is exactly why I don't like MS Documents, because I use OpenOffice, I knew how portable PDF files are, but discovered the large size that the files became, so I needed to find a way to compress them, and the above is what I came up with, but there could be even simpler methods out there, this was the first thing I had done that worked for me, if I discover any other ways, I'll keep everyone informed here.

The other alternative to ps2pdf is Acrobat Distiller, which might even produce smaller again, though it's not as robust as ps2pdf. You would have to look into how to use Distiller, as I have not use it in a long time and can't remember the exact process to do such a thing.

Cheers,


MC

I too use open office 90% of the time, I only use M$ Office on campus computers and when I too need to check formatting for submitting work in M$ filetypes.

I must add though, it shouldn't be shocking that they would say something like this... I mean come on. If they were asked about OO.o and they replied "Actually it does everything Office does... AND FOR FREE!!!" It wouldn't make much business sense They won't exactly sell alot of copies of an expensive program suite by telling people there is a great free alternative haha.