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Is OpenOffice Any Good?

PostPosted: Thu Sep 25, 2003 6:31 pm
by craiger
Hi. Anyone have this program? Is it as good as Microsoft Office XP? I see now it has MS compatibility. Can you save in the Word format without having Word installed? Thanks, Craig.

PostPosted: Thu Sep 25, 2003 6:37 pm
by Justin42
I haven't tried the latest release, but have been somewhat impressed with past releases. It works a bit differently than Word, so if you're very used to Word, it will be a bit of a learning curve (but not much).

It's been fairly Word compatible for a while, I've used it to recover Word documents for my boss that got so corrupted Word couldn't properly open them! I just load 'em into Open Office and re-save them as something else, and she's able to use them fine in Word again. Quite impressive, really!

I'd definitely say to try it -- it's free, you don't really have anything to lose. And no, you don't need any Microsoft Office product installed for it to work.

The only thing I should mention is you should have a decently fast machine for it to run well-- it's not written in Java (a common misconception) but it does need a good amount of horsepower behind it to run totally smooth. I'd say at least a 1Ghz machine and it'd be fine. (I only bring this up as we have some old machines for a computer lab that we'd like to have as small, "free" software stations but can't run OO very well)

PostPosted: Thu Sep 25, 2003 9:35 pm
by CDRecorder
I haven't tried a recent release, but OpenOffice seems pretty nice. In my opinion, it isn't as good as Office XP yet, or at least it wasn't when I last tried it. I still have to use Office because I frequently deal with some very complicated Word documents which OpenOffice just can't (or couldn't) deal with.

PostPosted: Mon Sep 29, 2003 4:29 pm
by manni
Yes you can save and open Word docs. I haven't used any MS Office product for over an year. OpenOffice.org feels good and it's open source.