Open Office Suite

[uuvpitfmklou]

Don't be fooled by illegal copies of Microsoft Office selling for 49$
- 69$. These are not licensed copies and could end up costing you more
than $100,000 in copyright fines or willful infringement. Open Office
is a fully licensed alternative software to Microsoft Office. Get the
peace of mind of purchasing a licensed Office Suite for a quarter of
the price.
Illegal copies can range from simply giving you access to P2P file
sharing applications, copying original CD's onto a CD-R, or allowing
you to download an image file of a copied CD. These are all highly
illegal, and Microsoft is known for it's strict standards in combating
copyright infringers.
http://openofficego.blogspot.com/#

 

[JE McGimpsey]

Don't be fooled ... <snip>
Get the peace of mind of purchasing a licensed Office Suite for a
quarter of the price.

Don't be fooled by people repackaging a FREE, Open Source product and
selling it for $47!! Especially one from a company which says

System Compatibility: MAC - compatible, not supported

They can't even spell "Mac" right!

If MacOffice isn't for you, download Open Office for FREE at

http://openoffice.org

Note that this is a Unix port, and requires the use of X11.

But a far better (and still FREE!!) interface for Mac is provided for OO
with NeoOffice, which can be dowloaded from

http://www.neooffice.org

 

[Jim Gordon MVP]

Some caveats:

Don't be surprised if OpenOffice takes over all of your Microsoft Office
documents without asking for your permission.

Like any product, be sure that whatever flavor of OpenOffice you try out
meets your needs. Especially when it comes to fonts, OpenOffice seems to
have a mind of its own.

I think it would be more honest to call it Sun Microsystem's Office, since
they did the bulk of the work and deserve most of the credit or blame for
the product.

-Jim

Don't be fooled by people repackaging a FREE, Open Source product and
selling it for $47!! Especially one from a company which says

System Compatibility: MAC - compatible, not supported

They can't even spell "Mac" right!

If MacOffice isn't for you, download Open Office for FREE at

http://openoffice.org

Note that this is a Unix port, and requires the use of X11.

But a far better (and still FREE!!) interface for Mac is provided for OO
with NeoOffice, which can be dowloaded from

http://www.neooffice.org

--
Jim Gordon
Mac MVP

MVPs are not Microsoft Employees
MVP info

 

[JE McGimpsey]

Don't be surprised if OpenOffice takes over all of your Microsoft Office
documents without asking for your permission.

Hmm.. Never had this happen. Sounds more like an OS problem than an OO
problem, unless you mean something different by "take over" than I think
you do.

Like any product, be sure that whatever flavor of OpenOffice you try out
meets your needs. Especially when it comes to fonts, OpenOffice seems to
have a mind of its own.

I only use about 5 fonts. Are there specific ones that cause problems?

I think it would be more honest to call it Sun Microsystem's Office, since
they did the bulk of the work and deserve most of the credit or blame for
the product.

Nah - Sun released the source code for StarOffice as OpenOffice1.1, but
since then, development has been a community effort that has
significantly expanded its capabilities and reliability.

 

[Jim Gordon MVP]

Hmm.. Never had this happen. Sounds more like an OS problem than an OO
problem, unless you mean something different by "take over" than I think
you do.

When I install OpenOffice after installing Microsoft Office, then Open
Office changes the file associations of Word, Excel and PowerPoint over to
OpenOffice. It does this without asking and I can't stop it from happening.
I would expect it to do so for OpenDoc format, but not for other product's
file formats. Worse, if I manually reset all the associations back to Word,
Excel and PowerPoint using Finder and "Change ALL" then the next time I use
OpenOffice it changes them back to OpenOffice again without asking and
without recourse. This is extremely bad behavior and is totally
unacceptable.

I only use about 5 fonts. Are there specific ones that cause problems?

Arial, Times, just about every font. Make a presentation in PowerPoint and
see how it looks in OpenOffice. Same thing with Word. OpenOffice opens the
documents, OK but they look very different from how they were created.

Nah - Sun released the source code for StarOffice as OpenOffice1.1, but
since then, development has been a community effort that has
significantly expanded its capabilities and reliability.

Sun released the source code, true. But it is such a convoluted, tangled,
impenetrable mess that only one or two of the developers working on the code
are people who do not work for Sun Microssystems. That's hardly a
"community."

It takes a lot of money (or call it time, organization, commitment,
motivation, enthusiasm or whatever) to make large projects successful.
OpenOffice seems to have exceeded the upper limit as to the kinds of
projects that can be successful using an open source model. Relatively easy
projects such as web browsers and mail clients lend themselves to the open
source model. Hard to do stuff (meaning expensive to make) like office
applications, calendars, and Active-X languish and starve for resources.

Even large enterprises that use OpenOffice such as IBM and the government of
China, loaded with money and talent, are loathe to devote resources to
OpenOffice and other open source projects. The price vs quality equation
evaluates to price for these folks. If they pitch in, that tips the equation
back to commercial software. But it sure sounds good in the press when they
say they "support" open source by using free products.

-Jim
--
Jim Gordon
Mac MVP

MVPs are not Microsoft Employees
MVP info