Emergency Software Recomend

Can anyone here tell me where I can find a piece of software that would allow me to go a whole week without upsetting my wife?

;)

OK thats not true... I want to know if ANYONE would reccomend Open Office instead of MS Orifice 2003???

OO isn't anywhere near as good as MS Office, but its not bad and its free.

Why don't you just download it and try it out??

[edit] Oh, and the correct spelling is 'recommend' ;)

I would not recommend it over Office 2003. Saying that, it's a capable suite of software and as Gfk said, it's free. Download it, give it a whirl, it's pretty good. If you dislike it, then buy Office 2003.

OpenOffice is great from the outside.
The options to load PSDs and save as PDFs are great.

But, to be honest, something is wrong with OO Writer and needs to be fixed.

When you get further into formatting, it turns out to be a bit of a mess.
When a table is set to be as big as the page, it is almost impossible to move it around. I have had experiences with blank pages appearing in the beginning of the document (not just the end), which seem to be fixed by reloading it. (Further WTF).

If I have a full-page image and a full-page table, it seems impossible to rearrange these so that the image appears Before the table (1st page) instead of after.
Sometimes I end up with two duplicate images placed one after the other... sometimes duplicate tables, too. Perhaps because they're a bit bigger than the page.


The layout of options is mimicking Word, except in a few critical places such as headers and footers.
I am almost sure that those options actually move to new places each time I start the program.
I have not yet figured out how to have a particular header/footer for the first page, with every page afterwards doing a different one. I've had to go into Word to do that, instead.
That is sort of justified, since the pages are done using what is clearly just tables... which leads me to a thought: Considering that page margins and headers/footers are layed out using tables, why not add features to Tables for repeating themselves on every page so that Page options are really just Table options?
Maybe also give tables a handle so that they can be dragged around/completely selected even when they're really big, which could make it possible to remove mysterious blank pages.

More stuff I found annoying:
In Word, you can specify how many columns a table cell spans.
This is quickly and easily done with the Draw Table feature by removing a line from a row.
OO doesn't need this same feature, but it needs some way to set cell Span. Right now, I have to export to Word, use Word to set the cell's Span attribute, then put it back in OO.
OO understands this perfectly, but it can't set it itself.

The UI, as I wrote above, is way too similar to Word's.
In my opinion, they are vastly different word processors. If I want to use Word, I'll use Word.
The Borders/Shading windows look exactly the same in both programs, except in OO it is harder to find.
OO suffers from UI problems like Blender's, which is that it doesn't know what it is.

Is it Word, or is it something better?


I have a lot of time on my hands so I could join their developer community and see about fixing some of it.
The problem is that I'm sure right now they are running around in circles trying to recreate Office 2007's Ribbon feature, and so going in a new direction would be considered a waste of all that work and, undoubtedly, anger various users who treat Microsoft as some kind of Messiah who we all must follow.
Thus, I would have to start a new branch... which would suck.



...Uhm... What I mean to say is, OO Writer needs work and there are better alternatives. There are a few other free open-source word processors which people really like.
Other parts of the OO suite, such as Impress, are very good... and Writer isn't bad; all word processors are annoying in some way.
OO is much better value than Office 2003, anyhow, considering that it is free.

Give it a try; you may really like it!

OO is free, give it a try. I like it, my wife hates it. So a 50/50 recomendation.

I've been very pleased with Writer and I use it for all of my university coursework and creative writing. However, if your grammar is a bit shakey then Word might be a better choice, because Writer lacks a grammar checking tool.

I use OO, removed MS Office on all my PC's.

Does everything I need to and probably more than I'm capable of.

I only use OO because Im lazy, but its been fine for me. Its a bit tricky to move the images around...

It is decided then... OO is a try... now what about the suggestions on not annoying my wife? ;) Oh well... something I have to work out on my own...

Yeah, let me know how you get on with that one.

You know my wife was born in China... sadly for her I do not understand the total range of the vocabulary she hurls at me... Yet she seems to like OOo. I think it is the language menus that help. She runs Redhat9 in Chinese on one laptop and Win2k in English on her home CPU and work CPU... She found out she can run OOo on her linux lappy and she is much happier with me.

Now if I could only get a job... two weeks without work has me bored.

Personally I prefer it over MS, although OO seems a little more at home on Linux, but that may be my own preference creeping in.

Good luck, I tried it and never turned back - and best of all it's free.


"The UK, the only place where a pizza takes less time to arrive than an ambulance"

For the record, I don't dislike OO.

I use it before Office most of the time.
Word has tons of flaws, too... and it's made by a terrible software company. (Don't believe me? Try using [a video.msn.com]MSN's Video service[/a] if you're using ANYTHING that isn't developed by Microsoft).

It has some cool features, too!
For example:
OpenOffice documents, even in Windows, have preview images.
Pages seem easier to control. That may just be me, though.
It has support for every file format I have tried in it so far.


OO is definietly nicer in Linux.
...Probably because I can't point out how Word does better than it at various things since it doesn't exist for Linux, and because there aren't many full office suites available for free.
(And any flaws in OO that I've seen - with the exception of messy but still superior image placement - are already listed).

It really depends on what you're trying to accomplish. In my case, OOo beats office 2003 hands down -- OO does everything I need it to do, doesn't try to gets its tentacles into the windows innards like Office 2003, and it's free. Hard to beat.

On the other hand, all I use it for is some personal stuff, and I don't really need to exchange documents with the world at large. If you do that for a living, you may run into small incompatibilities with the rest of the world which is largely based around microsoft office.

I've used Microsoft office at work, but I don't miss it for a second at home. Certainly not to the extend of justifying paying hundreds of dollars more than "free". (but again, I'm not an office power user, so your milage may vary.)