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Topic: Tired of Microsoft Office? But need to be compatible with it?
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VoiceofTreason
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 5852
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posted 23 June 2004 05:34 PM
Open source results in another gem for Windows, Linux or Mac Users:If you need the features of Office (Word, Excel, Powerpoint) but none of the bloat and the cost, go to: OpenOffice You can open and save as MS files. I've been experimenting with it and found it to be equivalent in most respects.
From: Toronto | Registered: May 2004
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WingNut
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 1292
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posted 23 June 2004 07:15 PM
Most people will agree the OpenOffice presentation component, Impress, is actually superior, but completely compatible with, PowerPoint.Where I work, we now purchase MS Office standard Edition, which ships with Word, Excel and Outlook, and is substantially less espensive than the Professional version, and we use OpenOffice's Impress to substitute, where neccessary, for PowerPoint. As well, the Draw program is excellent and exports directly to all major graphic file formats and directly to PDF so business card ad, 3.5" x 2", outputs a PDF page, exactly as you want it, 3.5" x 2". The spreadsheet is excellent and a good competitor for Excel. The Word processor while great for everyday users, still needs work before serious editors (markup, notation, etc ...) will adopt it. But keeping in mind it is only a few years old (two?), and completely free. Lookout Microsoft. [ 23 June 2004: Message edited by: WingNut ]
From: Out There | Registered: Aug 2001
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Rufus Polson
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 3308
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posted 24 June 2004 01:18 PM
OpenOffice is nice, but on Linux I actually prefer Gnumeric for spreadsheeting and Abiword for word processing. That's one nice thing about Linux--choice.
Abiword's somewhat less featureful than OO's word processor, but has all the usual stuff, you know, formatting, headers, footers, tables, yadda yadda, and is snappy as all get out and feels sorta more friendly to me. A tiny feature I just realized how much I like is that if you hit the "insert" key and it changes to overtype mode, which I do by accident sometimes, the cursor turns red, so you can notice it before you accidentally type over anything.Gnumeric just rocks. Unless you're doing advanced tables type stuff, I much prefer it to OO's calc program. If you have reasons to need serious mathematical accuracy it's also considerably better than either Excel or Calc. And again, it's very fast. You can say OOo don't have the bloat of MS Office, but you don't know what bloat-free and speedy are until you've worked with Abi and Gnumeric. But then that's one nice thing about Linux and Open Source--choice. There's a stack of web browsers too. And you know, aficionados favour different ones, but they're all superior to IE. If nothing else, they all tend to have tabbed browsing and popup- and ad-blocking abilities.
From: Caithnard College | Registered: Nov 2002
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WingNut
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 1292
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posted 24 June 2004 07:49 PM
Frankly, on Linux, I love KOffice. The word processor, you know, also does DTP. It is fast, is much more like the old Apple suite in terms of look and feel, and not being bloated snaps open when you want it.But, choice, yeah, that would be the best part. There is so much. The way the free market is supposed to be, no?
From: Out There | Registered: Aug 2001
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radiorahim
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 2777
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posted 25 June 2004 02:27 AM
quote:
But, choice, yeah, that would be the best part. There is so much. The way the free market is supposed to be, no?
Yes the so-called "free market" doesn't give us much choice at all in office suites whereas the free and open source software movement gives us lots of choices. I use Abiword on an ancient early Pentium vintage notebook that I have...exactly because it is such a "thin" programme and doesn't consume much in the way of resources...otherwise I use Open Office Writer. Open Office Impress is...well impressive! Its much easier to use when doing presentations than MS Powerpoint. Must confess that though I have KOffice running on my Linux boxes I haven't made much use of it mostly because I'm used to Open Office which I can run across both Linux and Windoze. What does have to be fixed on Open Office is that it opens up quite slowly. If you're running Open Office on an older vintage computer it can be painfully slow opening up. Hopefully this will get fixed in a future edition. What's also great, is Xpdf. It opens those .pdf files much faster than the Adobe Acrobat reader.
From: a Micro$oft-free computer | Registered: Jun 2002
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DrConway
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 490
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posted 25 June 2004 04:28 AM
PS. Instead of buying the hugely expensive Adobe Acrobat PDF-maker, may I recommend either Jaws PDF Maker or PDF995?Macintosh users are not out in the cold. They, too, can make PDFs. Check it out. Check out Ghostscript if you've got *nix.  [ 25 June 2004: Message edited by: DrConway ]
From: You shall not side with the great against the powerless. | Registered: May 2001
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Michelle
Moderator
Babbler # 560
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posted 25 June 2004 07:22 AM
Wingy, I'm surprised that your workplace is open about using OpenOffice for their presentation program, but not switching entirely to OpenOffice for all their needs.Then again, I've used the word processor, and it's not anywhere near as handy as Word is. I mean, if you're only using the word processor for typing straight text, it's great. But I use it for mail merges and labels and envelopes and such, and I've found that making labels and business cards isn't great with the word processor. If it were, I'd switch immediately, but making labels and doing mail merges constitutes a considerable percentage of my usage.
From: I've got a fever, and the only prescription is more cowbell. | Registered: May 2001
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Cougyr
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 3336
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posted 25 June 2004 12:01 PM
quote:
Originally posted by DrConway:
PS. Instead of buying the hugely expensive Adobe Acrobat PDF-maker, may I recommend . . .
AbiWord will print to PDF. Michelle, I have a big distaste for receiving e-mail that was put together with a mail merge. That stuff is an absolute pain. My wife's old Win 95 machine won't even open it. She gets a blank. Nada. My Linux box will open it, but frankly, when people mail merge to me I generally delete it. I can't be bothered. I think the problem is that Microsoft's mail merge is really awkward. Microsoft wants the receiving reader to know that he/she got something that was done on Microsoft Office. If their mail merge worked properly, it would be indistinguishable from any other e-mail.
From: over the mountain | Registered: Nov 2002
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Cougyr
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 3336
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posted 25 June 2004 12:47 PM
quote:
Originally posted by Michelle:
Cougyr, I wasn't talking about e-mail mail merges. I was talking about the good, old-fashioned kind - printing letters from a mail merge, or printing labels or envelopes from a mail merge.
Oh, sorry. On a related topic, I dislike software "suites." They are too bulky; they use too many resources - memory and the like. And, frequently, they don't do anything well. I do like precise programming. Some of the best programming was done for the Commodore 64, because space was at a premium. Our modern computers with huge harddrives and monster RAM allows for very sloppy programming. If MS Word was written with the same precision as Paper Clip III, it would be about half as big and far more effective.
From: over the mountain | Registered: Nov 2002
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VoiceofTreason
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 5852
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posted 25 June 2004 04:19 PM
Wow.I'm new to babble so i didn't really expect the response. I'm glad so many of you are open-sourcers. The post was really directed to windoze slaves who for some reason or another needed to run the MS OS. Primary appeal of open office: cross-platform. But you're all right of course not everthing is as well polished as it might be. I'm remided of an old military proverb, possibly Sun Tzu: Perfect is the enemy that is "good enough". Open Office is definately good enough for most users to give MS Office the jitters. [ 25 June 2004: Message edited by: VoiceofTreason ]
From: Toronto | Registered: May 2004
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radiorahim
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 2777
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posted 04 July 2004 09:06 PM
quote:
I'm all for open source, but the fact that this laptop is brand new and can't run Open Office without chugging along is quite distressing.
I find that OO.o is slow when the software initially opens up but after that its fine. The slow start-up is something that the OO.o development team is working on so expect future versions to be much better. But at least when the upgrade does come out it'll be free unlike you know who 
From: a Micro$oft-free computer | Registered: Jun 2002
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