Open Office

[JTrader]

Hi

does anyone use Open Office www: OpenOffice.org - The Free and Open Productivity Suite as opposed to Microsoft Office?

It is fully compatible with MS Office.

How does Open Office compare? is it just as good as MS office?

Cheers.

 

[JTrader]

I also wanted Paint Shop Pro for free but couldn't find a way of getting it, so I'm trying "The Gimp" GNU image manipulation freeware.
GIMP - Windows installers

 

[rnicoll]

I use OpenOffice.org (yes, the .org is part of the name, it's insane) mostly, although I have a copy of MS Office around for when people send me Word/Excel docs and I don't fancy finding out just how good Org's compatibility is. Certainly, I've never found anything I want to do, that I can't do as easily on Org as I could on MS Office.

People who use Photoshop tell me it's a lot easier to use than GIMP (again with the stupid names, it's one of my pet peeves about open source). GIMP's a lot better than it used to be, at the very least. It's an image manipulation program, not a drawing program, though... so not really a direct replacement for Paint Shop Pro.

 

[JTrader]

I use OpenOffice.org (yes, the .org is part of the name, it's insane) mostly, although I have a copy of MS Office around for when people send me Word/Excel docs and I don't fancy finding out just how good Org's compatibility is. Certainly, I've never found anything I want to do, that I can't do as easily on Org as I could on MS Office.

People who use Photoshop tell me it's a lot easier to use than GIMP (again with the stupid names, it's one of my pet peeves about open source). GIMP's a lot better than it used to be, at the very least. It's an image manipulation program, not a drawing program, though... so not really a direct replacement for Paint Shop Pro.

Yes i'd agree with that.

 

[ns1000]

I use them both and have to say that they do everything I need them to. Openoffice isnt't quite as intuitive as MS Office, but maybe that's becasue I've use the MS version for the last 15 years. Definitely not worth paying for the MS version if you're only using it occasionally.

 

[AnEdge]

It depends on what you want to do...Openoffice is great and for 99% of normal use works just fine compared to MSFT Office. BUT if you want to start doing heavy lifting, eg. real-time calculations and processing in Excel with a lot of VBA behind it, then OpenOffice will start to show its quirks.

Short answer...for noraml "office/corporate" stuff there are no real issues...if you want to use it for trading related applications, that will cause some hair-pulling and late nights.

 

[dcraig1]

Another well regarded open source drawing package (for SVG graphics) sort of equivalent to Adobe Illustrator, CoralDraw etc

Inkscape. Draw Freely.