Tech MS Office vs Open Office

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Long story short, I'm looking to move over to a different PC without MS Office. I'm what I consider to be a power user of Word and Excel, using both of them frequently for personal use (including the leaderboards etc.). I don't care too much about MS Word, but can anyone attest to any pros and/or cons of whatever Open Office's spreadsheet software might be? How well does Open Office's program translate heavily formatted spreadsheets/rules/macros etc.? Any help would be appreciated, thanks.

I'll be honest, if it's not worth it, I'm going to just pop in the trial and wait until some extra cash comes my way to pick up MS Office again.

(Yes, a quick Google gave me reasonable results, but the input of people I am familiar with is easier to gauge (in terms of value) than that of strangers.)
 
Honestly I always use Open Office, and it covers most of your needs that Microsoft word does, only problem is most people send stuff through Microsoft programs, so unless you have it installed most of the programs will come out a little different than if you use Microsoft word.

In the end though if your going use it for your own personal use and not for business or school, I say it is a good fit and really if you don't like it, it was free and very easy to uninstall anyways :elmo:
 
Well, i have Open Office, but haven't used Excel nearly as much as Word. I can tell you that Word in OO is just the same as MS office, with one exception of a non-removable advertisment on the righ-hand side that becomes pretty easy to ignore. From what I can remember (too lazy to pull out my laptop) Excel is the same way. It's just a free version that never expires. my bet is that it'll work the same as your MS office.
 
So ultimately there are just a few issues converting?

I know Kirababes uses Open Office and when she sends me spreadsheets they sometimes come out with odd formatting (cells and text being formatted completely black, the same exact shade of black) but nothing entirely that kills you.

I'm mainly concerned about my macros and such, as far as what will happen with them. I went through a lot to get it "just so" hahaha :damon:
 
Have you tried LibreOffice? It's free and has spreadsheet, pp, word and all that good stuff. Files can be saved in virtually any format i.e. XP/2003 etc. doc.
 
Apache Open Office

Text Document
Saves in:

.odt/*.odt, .ott/*.ott, .sxw/*.sxw, .stw/*.stw, .doc,/*.doc Word 97/2000/XP, Word 95, Word 6.0, .rtf/*.rtf, .txt/*.txt, (.html)/(*.html), .xml/*.xml

Has plugins for different languages, etc. As far as I know it has the same basics going on like Word does, I personally prefer Open Office, but I noticed that opening my .doc saved in Open Office spaced ONE word in my resume to the right when opening it in Word. The little... :ahmed:

Spreadsheet, Presentation, Drawing, Database, Formula, and a thing called Templates (never used it). I used the Spreadsheet, and from what I know it pretty much looks the same, like you always tell me, you just gotta get used to it. Download it, give it a try, see how different it is, can't really just base this all on opinion. :gasp: Even if it's great, you might think it's shit. But I guarantee you, if you think it's shit, you are wrong. Etc. =]

/Not helpful, but more insight.
​
 
I have open office, but not through choice.. its FREE so who am I to complain, it does get the job done but it really isnt a patch on MS word. But yeah like I said its free..
 
MS Office is now great overall. I'm loving the fact that one can pay for it on a monthly basis, instead of forking over a huge chunk of change just to download it. Downside, installation seemed to take longer than before. As far as functionality goes, it all pretty much feels the same. The UI has gone through a slight overhaul, but I didn't have a problem with that before anyway.

I have nothing against OpenOffice. I used it for the longest time because I was broke. It's free and gets the basic jobs done. I think it's a great substitution program, but I've always preferred Office.
 
I normally use LibreOffice (think of it like the new version of OpenOffice--LibreOffice is where most of the old OpenOffice community is, now) and I've worked with transferring Excel spreadsheets to Calc spreadsheets before. In my experience everything has worked just fine, macros and all. Transferring from Word is usually fine so long as the original Word document didn't use fancy image effects or other unique formatting. Transferring from PowerPoint is a pain, but doable. Don't even bother trying to transfer from Access. Sounds like you mostly use Excel though, so you should run into very few issues. You'll be happier overall with MS Office if you can spare the cash, but LibreOffice will work just fine.
 
Guys, this thread was made a year ago in two weeks. :P

Just used the student discount to get MS Office again and haven't looked back. Thank you for the feedback, though. :)
 
Still makes for a nice discussion thread though. Why not use it?

Kudos on getting it. I'm sure it's made your mentioned work quite a bit easier since.
 
I've used MS Office for decades and then having to move to Open office was a real struggle. I'm sure it's fine as an individual problem but having to adapt to all the little minor differences you dont even think about until they aren't there was a real pain.
 
I recently switched to open office for documents because of me being a fairly cheap fuck. I had no intention of purchasing Office myself, so open office was the only office suite I could really get.

It's... decent. The word processor generally works for me. The spell check can be a bit of a bother to use(I've recently moved to using Notepad++ for reports though, with its spellcheck plug in. Such a great application choice). The slideshow viewer is fine for making custom slides


But slides transferred from powerpoint are usually messed up, distorted and any notes below the slides are wiped.

However, I do not think that open office is particularly bad. It works as it should for an open-source suite. To expect MS Office level service is just asking too much. I'm happy with it for what I use it for currently. I'll probably try nab a pass on my sisters when she purchases MS office next though.


Though... I have heard of stories wherein a friends Open Office spell check wouldn't work. Instead, he pasted into Facebook's message boxes and spell-checked that way.
 
I used Open Office for the longest time because I don't think it's fair to spend so much money on a software that updates every few years. >.>

I prefer Microsoft Office overall though, so I recently picked up the Student Edition. I believe it was only $80 for 4 years or something? You can use it so long as you verify that you are a student (basically just need a ".edu" e-mail address).

My only current issue with Microsoft Office atm is LOCKING MY DAMN FILES!! :rage:

Seriously, I had like a 7 page paper that I wanted to tweak at school 2 hours before class and because I originally worked on the paper at home, I COULDN'T FREAKIN' OPEN IT. I had to do some ridiculous amount of copy and pasting from a PDF file I managed to convert and then edit all of the spacing... JEEZ.

They really need to fix that crap 'cause I hate it when I can't access certain files while I'm on lunch break or after work/before class.
 
Chanteru said:
I prefer Microsoft Office overall though, so I recently picked up the Student Edition.
Click to expand...
For my businesses, I pretty much have to use their "business" editions.

I'm using Access constantly for most of my clientele; it's a tedious little program, but it's not too difficult.
 
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