Open Office

Obi Heed Kenobi

Obi Heed Kenobi

Touchdown! Greaser!
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iBo Deeh Ibonek
Can anyone tell me about Open Office?

Specifically, I'm interested in how well it works with Word. My work computers all have Word installed, but I'm doing a lot of work at home on evenings and weekends.

If I were to use Open Office at home, would I be able to email things from work to home, and then work on them at home, and then email them back to work? Are there any problems that might pop up?

Thanks for any thoughts/comments.
 
Obi Heed Kenobi said:
Can anyone tell me about Open Office?

Specifically, I'm interested in how well it works with Word. My work computers all have Word installed, but I'm doing a lot of work at home on evenings and weekends.

If I were to use Open Office at home, would I be able to email things from work to home, and then work on them at home, and then email them back to work? Are there any problems that might pop up?

Thanks for any thoughts/comments.
Click to expand...

I've used it in the past to take Word docs and publish them to PDF. Works as intended most of the time, but it sometimes was less than perfect in dealing with multicolumn word docs that had grids, images and such. Still mission capable for what I wanted it for.
 
David,

I would take a file from work that has formatting and such, make a copy of it then take it home and edit it in Open Office, finally haul it back to the office and see how things turned out.

I have seen it have issues with formatting and such on some stuff.

Good Luck.

Randy
 
Thanks. I'll let you guys know what happens.

Basically, I've cooked my home computer, so I had to order a new one. I heard about Open Office a few weeks ago for the first time, so I thought I'd give it a shot to see what happens.

Plus, I feel an obligation to give as little of my money to Microsoft as possible. :)
 
David, I have Open Office loaded on every computer at my firm, for the sole purpose of using it on those occasions when WordPerfect pukes on a Word file. Open Office works, from my experience, flawlessly.

I cannot comment on how different the user experience is than just using Word ("Turd?"), but I have never had a problem opening or saving Word docs, even with Microsoft's constant monkeying around with their document formats.

You should be certain to set in preferences that you want the software to save in whatever format the document was in when you opened it, or you'll find yourself having to tell it every time to save as (whatever), rather than ODF, OpenOffice's (actually open) format.

--

Edit:

I thought I'd try Word again, to see if it was time to throw in the towel and change - Nope! For text formatting (like, say, legal documents) WordPerfect is still vastly superior to Word.
 
I love OPEN OFFICE and have been using it for many years, since my WORD license ran out. Several years ago, I took a CG AUX course on website design and powerpoint design. It was all based on Microsoft products. I finished up the powerpoint using OO at home, presenting it at my local chapter meeting. It was quite flawless.
I use OO Writer for work documents too. If you write the data in WORD format, it is mostly interchangable.
Free is good.
 
First, go flying instead of working at home. if you know what I mean...

How complicated are the word documents you need to read/modify at home?

Do you need to edit them or just read them?

Do you need to do fancy formatting?

The bottomline is that open office will be pretty good for simple word documents. The more complicated/fancy the formatting gets, the more likely that the open office team won't be able to keep up with the feature bloat from microsoft. (I'm not saying that microsoft would ever do anything to make open office less capable...I would never suggest that)
 
You should be aware that there is a newer offspring of OpenOffice. LibreOffice is a fork from OpenOffice and is being developed by The Document Foundation. I have switched from OpenOffice to LibreOffice and there have been no problems. I switched because LibreOffice is trying to distance themselves from Oracle who is heavily involved in OpenOffice. As you might expect there is controversy about all of this.

http://www.documentfoundation.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice
 
Word documents that have problems in OOo are generally DOCX, for some reason. Normal .DOC files aren't usually a problem.

The reason? 99.9% of the time, you will be just fine. For those 0.1% of the times that you have a problem, you're kind of hosed. The solution is to have everyone you work with change to OOo too :D
 
What's kind of funny about this is that I suppose I can blame Senor Skyhog for my interest.

Summarized, Nick posted something about a month ago regarding his new corporation and a requirement that software be open source whenever possible. I didn't even really know what that meant at the time.

A week or so after that thread, I heard about Open Office for the first time. I didn't really know what it was, so I gave it a good googling, and made a mental note.

About a week after that, my computer started having problems, and it finally crapped out on me last wknd. After all kinds of abortive efforts to get it going again, turns out that the whole thing is burned up. I blame it on the dog.

With getting a new computer, I figured I'd do homage to the 'Hog and give open source a shot. :)

Anyway, thanks for all the comments and advice. What I'll be using it for is pretty much exclusively legal documents - the most complicated thing is the case caption for motions and orders, which is really just a table. Unfortunately, I can't write Word out of the picture entirely. I'll let y'all know how it turns out.

And, Bob, I wish using the weekends for flying were an option right now. This fall, that might be possible; but for the time being, I've got to pay for food for the dog that I blame for destroying my computer! :D
 
Bob Noel said:
First, go flying instead of working at home. if you know what I mean...

How complicated are the word documents you need to read/modify at home?

Do you need to edit them or just read them?

Do you need to do fancy formatting?

The bottomline is that open office will be pretty good for simple word documents. The more complicated/fancy the formatting gets, the more likely that the open office team won't be able to keep up with the feature bloat from microsoft. (I'm not saying that microsoft would ever do anything to make open office less capable...I would never suggest that)
Click to expand...

I gotta say, I have not yet found a Word doc that the current version of OO won't open, edit, print and save well.
 
For most Office documents (especially the type that most businesses create that are barely more than a text file with some fonts), OO and Libre work fine.

Some things that didn't used to work if I remember correctly were more advanced -- like I don't think Pivot Table functionality in their version of Excel works at all. Maybe that's changed...

Proprietary things like the Windows Scripting stuff also probably has never worked.

So if you're opening things from "power users" of the Office Suite -- you may have problems. "Normal" documents, probably work just fine.
 
SCCutler said:
I gotta say, I have not yet found a Word doc that the current version of OO won't open, edit, print and save well.
Click to expand...

Here's one. The difference between Word and OOo are night and day.

Another big gap is VBA support. It supports some stuff, but for complex stuff (that really should have never been done in Office to begin with), it chokes.
 

Attachments

Just wondering: Did your existing software licenses burn up along with the computer?
 
SkyHog said:
Here's one. The difference between Word and OOo are night and day.

Another big gap is VBA support. It supports some stuff, but for complex stuff (that really should have never been done in Office to begin with), it chokes.
Click to expand...

I just opened that in Apple's Pages application, and it mangled it a bit... I bet the OO/Libre version looks similar. One warning: "Backgrounds not supported" from Pages, so that's probably one of the differences.

Looked like most of the information contained therein was just fine, though... just mangled formatting.

Not that I'm huge fan of Adobe by any means -- talk about a closed environment -- but PDF is sure a lot better way to distribute things meant for public consumption than a proprietary format only created by one specific word-processor.

Just because they called it a "document" format, it's really just their own file format for their word processor. ".doc" is misleading and always has been. ".word" would have been more accurate. ;)
 
Gmaper said:
You should be aware that there is a newer offspring of OpenOffice. LibreOffice is a fork from OpenOffice and is being developed by The Document Foundation. I have switched from OpenOffice to LibreOffice and there have been no problems. I switched because LibreOffice is trying to distance themselves from Oracle who is heavily involved in OpenOffice. As you might expect there is controversy about all of this.

http://www.documentfoundation.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice
Click to expand...
I don't blame them for wanting to distance themselves from Oracle. I think it's only a matter of time before Oracle starts charging for their software. They are the Computer Associates of PCs and midrange systems. I'm waiting for the bill for JAVA.
(*Computer Associates - Large scale computer software company that buys up great software companies and turns their products into mediocre products and kills off their excellent customer support all the while raising the cost of ownership.)
 
silver-eagle said:
I don't blame them for wanting to distance themselves from Oracle. I think it's only a matter of time before Oracle starts charging for their software. They are the Computer Associates of PCs and midrange systems. I'm waiting for the bill for JAVA.
(*Computer Associates - Large scale computer software company that buys up great software companies and turns their products into mediocre products and kills off their excellent customer support all the while raising the cost of ownership.)
Click to expand...

Like America Online was in the early 2000s? Remember how they raped WinAmp and Netscape?
 
silver-eagle said:
I don't blame them for wanting to distance themselves from Oracle. I think it's only a matter of time before Oracle starts charging for their software.
Click to expand...
I don't think the LO leadership even cared if Oracle would charge anything or not. After all, Canonical charges of Ubuntu LTS and Red Hat charges for RHEL. The fork happened because Oracle mismanaged the outside contributions and excercised control to the detrement of outside developers. There was a major influx of fixes and new code after the fork. Bother Fedora and Ubuntu switched to LO, presumably after doing a due dilligence on the health of the project.
 
zaitcev said:
After all, Canonical charges of Ubuntu LTS and Red Hat charges for RHEL.
Click to expand...

Just a note: Ubuntu does not charge for LTS in either their server or non-server versions :no:

It's available on their download pages for anyone to use if they want the longer release cycle.

http://www.ubuntu.com/download/ubuntu/download

Or...

http://www.ubuntu.com/download/server/download

(A lot of people miss the distinction between Ubuntu and Ubuntu Server -- they should have chosen a better name for the Server version, but it's really just a different selection of pre-installed packages.)

The only thing that costs money in the Ubuntu "world" is services/software from Canonical, which includes their web-based management platform called "Landscape".

http://www.canonical.com/enterprise-services/ubuntu-advantage/trial

There's also the regular and LTS ("Long-Term Support") versions of each, which tend to lag behind the main distro but have had a lot more testing and still get security patches as appropriate for a long period of time. Good for servers where you're in a corporate environment where a major upgrade takes a lot of "buy-in" from various departments and people. Less need to update, but still security conscious with appropriate packages being updated. Won't have the "latest" tools for many things, though.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LTS
 
denverpilot said:
Just a note: Ubuntu does not charge for LTS in either their server or non-server versions :no:
Click to expand...
Sure. You can also download RHEL source even if you are not a customer, which is what CentOS is built from.
denverpilot said:
The only thing that costs money in the Ubuntu "world" is services/software from Canonical, which includes their web-based management platform called "Landscape".
Click to expand...
Glad we clarified that. A knock-off of RHN is an essential building block for services architecture everywhere.
 
Yeah, in both cases you won't get the source code for their services applications that are their "value add". Those are closed-source.
 
zaitcev said:
Sure. You can also download RHEL source even if you are not a customer, which is what CentOS is built from.
Click to expand...

Its quite different to offer a product for free and charge for support and to offer 2 versions of a product: 1 free and 1 with a fee.

Not that I think any less of it, but the two models are quite different. Ubuntu is very much free software.
 
SkyHog said:
Ubuntu is very much free software.
Click to expand...
Absolutely not. Ubuntu ships all sorts of binary crap, such as graphics drivers. They are extremely promiscuous. Fedora and Debian are very much free software, if you want an example. RHEL is free software (RHEV-M is not though, we're working on it).
 
zaitcev said:
Absolutely not. Ubuntu ships all sorts of binary crap, such as graphics drivers. They are extremely promiscuous. Fedora and Debian are very much free software, if you want an example. RHEL is free software (RHEV-M is not though, we're working on it).
Click to expand...

I'm speaking specifically "Free like beer."

Although, one can easily use Ubuntu without any non-free (like speech) stuff as well, its just not as good.
 
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