One of the stronghold of commercial software – Miscrosoft Office, had been firmly brokened!
Open Office had been installed on my desktop for close to a year now, begnning with the 1.9 beta version.
From my experience, Open Office is more than capable to handle all the day to day requirement of document processing of a small business owner.
Take a look at Writer, Calc and Impress, they can do all of what you have been doing with Word, Excel and Powerpoint.
Writer, Word replacement.
Calc, Excel replacement.
Impress, PowerPoint replacement.
I have Microsoft’s licensing and activation policy to thank for stiffening my resolve to turn to Open Office.
It was a long story, but it is suffice to say that I have a hard time trying to activate my original Office on a new harddisk. The end result? I gave up, decided to try Open Office and never turn back since. When push comes to shove, resistance to change became strength for change. Looking back I’m glad I made the switch.
The next time you think of buying or upgrading Microsoft Office, give Open Office a try.
What I like about it?
- Create PDF document natively
- Excellent support for Word and Excel format
- Effectively replaced MS Office
What can be improved
- Support for PowerPoint format on Impress
- Support for Access database on Base
- Provide Keystoke binding for Calc that maches Excel
I learned so many Excel keystokes, it is ashame to have to relearn again
Chinese support
Simplified Chinese version of Open Office is available from http://zh.openoffice.org/index_gb.html
When visiting Openoffice.org using a Chinese system, the chinese page is automatically served and the respective download selected.
Where to get it?
- OpenOffice is at http://www.openoffice.org/
- Current version: 2.0.3
- Function: Office Productivity Suite
I’ve been using Open Office on a regular basis ever since I switched completely to Linux back in March. It’s been a pretty decent experience so far, and I really like the native “Export to PDF” function, but it’s still not perfect.
The user interface really blows, for one thing. After playing around with the gorgeous Office X for OS X, and the new Office 2007 beta, going back to Open Office for my every day use makes my eyes bleed.
Also, cross-format conversion isn’t perfect yet. I’ve noted some problems converting from Word XP files to the Open Office format.
In general I’d say that OO is a decent alternative to the commercial Office products, but it’s still far from taking over MS Office’s market share and mindshare.
I agree. YMMV. If you are a power user, Open Office has still a long way to go.
In my case OO is competent enough to create invoice, quotation, keep account, create simple presentation and drawings. I can open word and excel document from clients as well as send to them in doc, xls or pdf.
Yeah, OO is definitely good enough for most people. But not everyone will like it. Like I said, conversion is still an issue: my dad’s Windows partition failed yesterday and he tried to boot into Linux to use OO Impress to open his Powerpoint file, only to find that all the timings were messed up and the transitions too.
Also, MS Office 2007 is looking to be very, very sweet. I’m hoping to get a MacBook by the end of the year, and I’ll probably buy Parallels just so I can run Office 2007 on it instead of the old and outdated Office v.X
Right. Powerpoint support is still a major weakness.
Shy to say I have not converted anyone in the office to use OO though I had used it exclusively for almost a year.
I love to get a Mac too, maybe the Mac mini to let the guys play around in the office. I’m increasingly impressed by the number of developers converting to Mac.
Believe me I did not need any other os I got Windows with service packs to make it run like any other os out there right now I can even run Linux apps if I want to and my os looks similar to mac os x wich is a great interface without losing out on not being able to play my fun games or not being able to process my work how’s that for a super os!!