OpenOffice Doesn’t Suck Anymore!
Great news for us open sorcerers…OpenOffice is OK now!
I used this world beater when it was StarOffice. Somebody in Germany in the mid-1980s thought MS Office needed some open source competition. It was acquired by Sun Microsystems during the summer of 1999 and StarOffice 5.2 was released in June of 2000. I used it for the first time in July of 2000. It was awful.
There is still a StarOffice product (I think), but this is the open source derivative. BASE is the database product; CALC is a spreadsheet; DRAW is weirdly enough a drawing tool; IMPRESS is a presentation tool; MATH should have been included with CALC and WRITER is a writer.
Those are the modules you can download for FREE! Whch is a huge price difference over MS Office unless you live in China, where MS Office costs like $1.00.
I used the StarOffice presentation tool in 2000 to create a presentation for delivery at a Sun Microsystems conference. I thought that was very open of me. What a disaster. It was buggy as heck. Half the time it would not open.
Last week I made a presentation in Pheonix to a customer migrating from Solaris to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. I downloaded OpenOffice in 15 minutes and I was creating my Impress presentation immediately. I actually enjoyed it more than that dreadful Redmond product called Powerpoint. The customer and the Red Hat sales rep in the room thought it was a nice touch as well.
I don’t like to do too many commercials, but give it a fair chance. Go to openoffice.org and download the package. If I was starting a small business today I would use it in a heartbeat (that’s very quick if you didn’t know). Trust me, OpenOffice really doesn’t suck.
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Comments
I use OpenOffice exclusively at home (they still use MS Office at the job). It works great, and allows me to create/import/edit documents in all the popular formats. It works great in windows. It is easy to use (especially if you are already familiar with MS office). And it is FREE. The only downside is some of the more complicated/advanced formatting elements in MS Office might not translate well. However in the time I've used it I have not run into any major problems with formatting between document types. I highly recommend OpenOffice to anyone that doesn't want to spend hundreds of dollars just to make a spreadsheet or a presentation.
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September 5, 2007 09:55 AM
I like everything positive. I’m on this website since the first day of its existence and I have never seen anything negative on it. This website is made by people, who think positive and who have many things to tell others. I love this website, I always get positive emotions from it and I can stay here the whole days and nights!
Posted by: ronnknee | April 9, 2008 06:07 AM