Web Development
Hi folks, have read a couple of discussions re open office. We are currently running Office 2000 and are planning to migrate to Office XP - however, Open Office has come into my line of thought and wondered if those of you who use it within Windows, were happy with it? Any areas I should think about?
Thank you.
by jaqui
from a cost viewpoint, it's far cheaper. ( free )
from a functionality viewpoint, it is slightly different.
the biggest glitch, for during a migration, is the document format during save.
open office will allow defaulting to m$ format, or it's own.
if you choose m$ format there will be warning message about possible formatting corruption.
other than that it's quite simple.
ooo ( open office . org ) uses a formatting model closer to working with a wyswyg website creator.
ie:
Header
paragraph
body
...
a word processor has always allowed a bit more control over the layout.
you can use menu tools to get that control with open office.
my own biggest complaint, fixed in 2.0, is/was the second window with the formatting options in it.
( I detest multi window interfaces like that )
I recieve a spreadsheet once a week that is created in M$ Excel. When I look at the file in a hex editor it appears to be created with the version of Excel in Office 97.
I have not been able to find a way to view these spreadsheets correctly. I've tried OpenOffice.org, gnumeric, and kspread. I haven't tried Crossover Office yet. I know that these spreadsheets have got graphs and action buttons. These do not work under any of the programs that I mentioned.
I think that if you trade documents with people in or out of your organization who use M$ Office you may have some compatibility problems. If, on the other hand, you don't exchange documents with anyone using M$ Office then you will probably be happy. I use OpenOffice.org suite for my own documents and I'm happy with the results. Keep in mind that I am not a document power user. I do a little bit of formatting but my documents are all very simple.
OpenOffice.org software defaults to using the open document formats. If other document software applications adopt these file formats then in theory documents will be easily read and edited correctly by all applications using these file formats. You can be assured, though, that M$ will not adopt open standards.
by roger99a
You're right. OOo used to run a setup program when a new user wanted to use the software. It would copy a LOT of files into a subdirectory of the user's home directory. The same thing was true about Sun's Star Office. I don't know if it still is this way.
Now when a person uses OOo for the first time is has a very short initialization where it creates a subdirectory. The difference is that it doesn't copy the entire application into that subdirectory as it used to do. It now just creates preferences files and cache directories and stuff like that. Very little disk space is required.
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