Open Office

Bart,

Consider a TechNet subscription.  Very good VFM for the genuine article.  IME, OO is tolerable only if Free is your top priority.

Nick

Ken,

I have used Open Office for several years now. My needs are admittedly very basic but I have had no problems with it and I've never found anything that I need to do that it is not capable of. Previously I used Microsoft Office Professional when we had our business but to be honest it was loaded with features that we never used.

I would certainly suggest that you give Open Office a go. If you start to find that it doesn't meet your needs then look elsewhere. Nothing to lose as it's free and surely better than paying for something that comes loaded with features thay may be superfluous for you.

Peter

Is open office similar to star office? An open source version.

I work at a hospital that used to use star office. It was verysimple and basic. The problem was when you had to deal with other people. Sending documents such as letters and spreadsheets were. Problems as the general world often had problems opening documents the hospital had sent using th tr office software. 

It was a nightmare and the hospital had to change direction and buy lots of Microsoft licences

As far as I remember Open Office is claimed to be comaptible with Microsoft Office. So if a word document or spreadsheet were emailed then the recipient should be able to open them with Microsoft Office. Having said this, when we tried it a few times the recipients claimed to be having difficulties opening the word docs. I think what happens is that a warning message appears when attempting to open a document saying 'unknown file type' or similar, but if this is ignored them the document will in fact open as normal. Obviously this needs to be checked and could be a potential issue for someone who regularly emails documents..... Certainly Microsoft Word docs will open in Open Office with no problems.

Peter

Can someone tell me if this product(open office) is free how do they make any money to keep going.

The saying up north is you dont get owt for nowt !!!

Mista h

Thanks Geoff

Why send out documents in an easy updateable state (unless it is a collaborative document) when it can be sent out as a PDF document which is more difficult to change. (Can be done with programs that cost money)

Open Office is a good system.  I've used it many times & know a lot of other who do.

Does everything & more a normal Office user needs & more.

I do't use it at moment as I got a free MS Office 2010 with the PC

But would not hesitate to get Open Office if I had to buy something

Its not owt for nowt as Mista H fears,  the parent cmpy sell lots of other stuff

We use it here seems to work well, and the price is great.

I have used Open Office and Google Docs and prefer both to Microsoft Office, I have recently switched though to Pages, Numbers and Keynote to produce all my documents and am absolutely delighted .. You can save to and open from legacy formats like .doc, .xls and .ppt without any issues. I got it when I went for a new iMac for work as i was sick of the PC they gave me, i wanted something that just worked not just crashed. The integration with iCloud is excellent too (though I doubt i'd store sensitive information in the cloud). 

For collaborative working though Google Docs is excellent and much better than the clunky old SharePoint/Office suite from Microsoft.

I would question if there is any need to buy Microsoft products these days ... It was sad so many business downgraded from Word Perfect offices to Microsoft, but the age of darkness has now past and the future looks so much brighter ..... 

Microsoft should concentrate on what they are best at ... making XBoxes ... 

Can be done with a program that cost no money.

http://www.nitroreader.com/

I've been using Nitro reader for years without a glitch. It convert most documents to PDF plus It also converts web pages or sections of web pages via the print function.

I use it, it's fine

There are many options to legally obtain Office for less than full price.  There are 'home and student' versions that are appropriate if you live in a home   There are also older versions available quite inexpensively.

I was an Open Office user for a while, but for short money moved to using Office on my Mac.  Fewer issues when sending edited files back to Office users.