Me again.....OpenOffice (another freebie for thread surfers)...comments please?

[SlightlyMadShrek]

I am thinking about trying this before I spend £100+ on MS office.

I am put off by the fact that is is a successor to StarOffice which had me pulling my teeth out.

So how close to MS is it? Will I be frustrated that I can't do something I can do in word/excel etc? Or will I be frustrated that trying to do something that is straightforward in MS Office is convoluted and clunky in OpenOffice.

?

SMS I recently downloaded open office and use MS office at work

I have to say I find Open office OK, but I haven't used any excel-ish documents, just word

It's OK. I downloaded it, as I bought a Mac and wanted to be Windows-free, and was too tight to buy the Mac Office package. I use it a bit, and so far have no complaints. My db uses it a lot, and hasn't bought Office for Macs.....

not much help, am I ?

I just want to be confident that I am going to be able ti use Office 2000 (or whatever archaic version we have) at work and be able to use Open office at home without too much "office confsuion" (I am thinking akin to nipple confusion here!!!).

StarOffice drove me mad because you could supposedly get the same result but sometimes things were so convoluted or backwards to get the same result as you would in the MS product.

I use it as a normal, and have to work with Office Docs. I don't have any issues. Seems pretty good to me.

It's fab. Try it, if you don't like it then bin it and go Microsoft. The only big problem you may come across is if you create documents with 'macros' in them in MS office or add any other VB content to them.

I use it, I find it more straight forward than Microsoft Office. We are thinking of scrapping the Microsoft where I work and changing over to OpenOffice. I use it for spreadsheets, powerpoints and word processing.

It's a lot better than StarOffice, mainly because they have lost that bloody stupid "desktop" thingy, which was just irritating.

For all practical purposes it works just like MS Office except that it's smaller, faster and free. The thing I like most is that /all/ documents can be saved directly as PDF's, making it dead easy to send stuff in emails.

I'm a Linux user normally, and have been on OpenOffice for years. In work I have to use Windows (spit) and although my machine there has MS Office I have also installed OpenOffice as I find it so much nicer.

Incidentally, you might like to investigate Ability Office (which I think Tesco sell under their own brand). It's Windows only, but very, very good - even better than OpenOffice.

I haven't used it for about 5 years, so it may be much better now but the Powerpoint equivalent drove me mad, and I found the whole thing a bit crude compared to MS Office, much as I hate to admit it.

We use OO at work, because they are too tight to pay for MS stuff.

It works perfectly well! I think it's better than MS office.

Well I have come up with a cunning plan.

Download onto old PC, have a play and then install it on this shiney machine if I like it.....if not my shiney new machine stays shiney and uncluttered...