OpenOffice.org... Superior to MS Office 2007?

Now that I have Vista, especially on my laptop, I probably would be best off getting a good set of productivity applications to go along with it. I see that Microsoft is also pushing a campaign to buy MS Office 2007 to go along with Vista. However, this would only lead to a $1K total price tag, if one were to go Ultimate on both of those. However, much to my chagrin, I have thought about going open source.

Now, having said this, has anyone tried OpenOffice.org 2.1 on Windows Vista yet? I'm sort of wondering if theirs is compatible with the new OS. Also, what features would OpenOffice.org provide, or leave out, as opposed to MS's suite? I thought about Corel, Microsoft, or OpenOffice.org. Would the freebie also be the best of the bunch as far as what it can do?

I've been using OpenOffice.org on Ubuntu and Red Hat for quite some time, and thought that it would probably go well with Windows as well. It most certainly makes for a great web development/HTML/XML tool, that much I can tell ya. Used this in Linux, and now I'm thinking of moving on to Vista with this suite. Anyone have any thoughts on this?

Better? No.

As good? Usually.

Good enough for most people most of the time? Yes.



Install it; see if it works; see if it does what you need it to do. If it does, then more power to you - and you've saved yourself hundreds of dollars. If not, uninstall it and be no worse off (and somewhat more informed).

You seriously don't need Office Ultimate, unless you're in a big Sharepoint / Office Server enviroment. Office Professional get you all the core apps, and a few goodies.

If you haven't tried it, the new Ribbon UI of Office (specifically in Word, Excel and a few others), while taking a few days to learn, absolutly smokes OO, Office 2003 and anything else you might name.

Although I haven't tried OO on Vista, I have installed the latest on an XP box. It's serviceable, mostly ok (unless you have lost of VBA macros), but decidedly old-hat compared to the sleekness of Office 2007.

Disclaimer: I have, use and recommend Office 2007 Professional to my family.

You cant really go wrong with OpenOffice - first its free and does most of what Office does. It may look slightly old, but thats the only downside to it.

Yes it really is. You cannot ignore the cost factor at all! Don't get me wrong, Office 2007 is brilliant, I am really impressed with it, but it isn't like it's a 40 quid program, it costs a bomb!

OpenOffice is rubbish (at least the word processing component is) and I'll tell you why:

Many people have huge problems with grammar and punctuation, and because OpenOffice lacks a "grammar checker" this means that they are unable to use it to produce decent prose. The worst thing is that most people don't realise how poor their knowledge of grammar really is, and so their errors go personally undetected. This obviously is a bad thing if they are writing things like C.Vs (resumes), advertising text, or engaging in "official" correspondence with someone via text.

JustLuke: So, Microsoft are for make benefit glorious use of grammar?

LMFAO!!! >.<

[hijack]
In OpenOffice, how the heck do I get the text I type in to stay at the size I've set? When I add text to the end of the last paragraph etc., it keeps reverting back to the default size. T'is very annoying. >:(
[/hijack]

The grammar checker built into Word really isn't that good, unless they've improved on it a lot lately. You can go ahead and google for proof.

Apparently if you want a better grammar checker you should buy Wordperfect instead, or better still just spend more tax money on education.

The spreadsheet thing in OpenOffice is horrid. You can do sums, averages, and that's it. No look up, statistics or text functions.

Craig:

I agree, but it's better than nothing and, also, it is at least capable of detecting commonly made mistakes such as the misuse of "its", "it's", "their", and "there".

I have heard that Wordperfect has a better grammar tool too, but this discussion is about comparing OpenOffice to MS Office 2007.

On a (somewhat) related note: the mistakes that I have mentioned above seemingly represent the norm on the internet. For example, I often need to purposefully include mispellings and grammatical errors in google phrase searches. Omitting them produces fewer results! Terrible.

gosse: Are you making that up? There's a whole heap of stuff included in Calc. Even the WEEKNUM() function (which gets translated to something else when you load an xls) is included, which is only part of an add-in to Excel.

Yeah, in fact I find it easier to do complex formulae in openOffice because of the way it organizes it.

OpenOffice makes you sterile.

You seem to be forgetting... IT'S FREE! ;)

Its not as 'good' as 2007 but...
Openoffice has most stuff that 'humans' use, wordprocessing, spreadsheet, dbase, pp style presenter, macros, templates, speller, thesaurus, clip/wordart, all installed OS fonts. People tend to think most of it is missing because it is simply in a different place. Also it can read/write XP.Doc/.xls/.ppt format as well as make PDF and a load of others.
(while not 2007 however, in relation to 97-2003 i would say probably as good)

Works 4 me.


@gosse, yes you can.

Ps: As far as it running on vista ok, it is down to wether gtk runs on it. Because so many apps rely on it i can imagine it will, or if not, an update is on its way.

And thats the important part - the FREE part.

Oh, and its quick and stable.

Hehe, great. Well, it seems as tho that OpenOffice is probably one of the only choices for Linux, it seems like Corel may be the best alternative for Windows over Microsoft. I, for one, see Corel selling far more than MS 2007 probably ever will in Vista's entire life cycle. I mean, MS DOES have a nice promotion, but believe me, going with the underdogs seems to be the best way to go, and I'd like to think that between OpenOffice and Corel, they'll probably see more downloads/sales than MS will this generation, I wouldn't be a bit surprised.

Hey dont listen to anyone above i got Finial sollution..

Use both. Office 2007 and Open Office 2.1

I Do so :=)

I belive if you can run vista you can use both.

Isnt MSoffice & corel the only compareable choices for windows? (there was lotus but it got stamped on) and theres OpenOffice for windows of course.

there are loads of individual apps on LX, BSD etc. for individual tasks:
abiword & other wordprocessors, several spreadsheets, scribus dtp etc (to mention just a few)

but is the only decent 'suite' i guess. Although saying that, hasnt MS office been tested to run in the emulator wine (not that theres a whole lot of point as OO does most of it anyway)?

Okay... Seems logical. I mean, now that I have been using Fedora Core as well as Vista, I guess that it's probably best to leave OpenOffice with the Red Hat partition and probably a $100 suite for Windows, preferably Corel over MS 2007, at this point. I mean, I'm not bashing MS 2007, but I just feel that for that price, I'd much rather save $50 and go with Corel. Maybe the H&S version of 2007 may be minimal, I'm not spending $300 for the Standard, if another brand can give you the same features for half that. No matter why Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates are so rich.

I can't speak for other countries here, but in Aus MS has really lightened up on the requirements for Academic stuff. There's restrictions, like not being able to upgrade, and not to use it for commercial work, but for home stuff you can make substantial savings...

> Many people have huge problems with grammar and punctuation

Erm, well isn't that the fault of the person using it if they can't use correct grammar and punctuation?

The thing that really annoys me about Office 2007 is that in some apps, like Powerpoint '07, WordArt has been updated so that *actually look presentable*. However, it's still the same old crap generator in Word '07 as there was in '97! Grrr!

And Corel will have them all delivered by flying pigs.

Superior? Depends on what you're looking for --

If you look for interoperability with other MS Office users, then MS Office is better.

If you looking at price/performance, then OpenOffice beats MS Office hands down.

For me, OpenOffice is perfect for use at home. At the office, MS Office works better (in part thanks to the ties between Outlook and Exchange)... But no way I'm going to be spending the $$$$$$ that Microsoft wants just to be able to type the occasional document at home.

True, I may be leaning more in the direction of the WordPerfect Office suite more than MS Office, at this point. I'm hoping that they'll eventually release a version that'll put MS 2007 to shame, and still be at half the price of even the most basic of Office 2007 suites. WP X4 seems like it may be worth something.

I use OO at work because the IT department would not install Office due to the additional license cost.

It works perfecty fine for me. Does everything I need to do.
Some functionallity can be a little quirky.
The PDF expoting works great and importing/exporting .rtf seems to work without a hitch.

For a FREE program you can't really knock it.

if you change your mind about bougt office 2007 you can always sell it :)

ENAY wrote:

Often, but don't forget about people with learning difficulties. My point was that a word processing application that helps minimise the negative impact of a person's deficiencies is better than one that doesn't. Hence this is one reason why Microsoft Office 2007 is superior to OpenOffice

My only gripe with Office (and I'm pointing at Office 2003) is that you can't seem to be able to do VBA with Publisher. It's crazy.

Publisher is arguably the best software to generate professional looking invoices, delivery notes, statements etc. Unless I'm missing something obvious, you can't get it to pull data from an ADO source, nor can you use VBA even to launch it from Excel.

vinylpusher,

I'd argue that point. You can do some pretty cool things with Word 2003 and Excel 2003, as far as page layout goes. With VBA, you can drive Word from Excel and get the best of both worlds.

Having said that, I've just fired up Publisher 2007, and it does have VBA.

I've found, though, that some VBA macros are not coming across properly in Office 2007. I'm debugging some other guy's crap, and he's got the Excel VAB stuff littered with API calls and other assorted garbage, and it's breaking. But, the problems seem to be confined to the API declarations and the window subclassing.

EDIT: Are you sure Publisher 2003 doesn't have VBA? Because I've just been in a VirtualPC where I keep an Office XP, and Publisher XP definitely has VBA.

This is from the EU report on the impact of open source software, thought it may be relevent here and answer your original post.

I wasnt sad enough to read the whole thing, just the conclusion at the bottom and found this :)



If you are more of a 'FREAK!' than me you can read the whole thing :P from here:
http://www.blitzbasic.com/Community/posts.php?topic=67294

Why, sure that's why OpenOffice seems faster, because it doesn't have all those fancy, schmancy effects and features that tie up your resources like MS 2007 seems to do. I'm hoping that Corel's not all that fancy, either. I mean, if that was supposed to be PRODUCTIVITY software, then Microsoft may need to reread the definition of productivity before doing anything with this slow, overfeatured suite of theirs.

Does Corel still produce office applications? I thought that Wordperfect had been scrapped.

Hmm, never thought of that. I mean, Corel was Microsoft's biggest rival for years and years, and they always claim to have better compatibility to MS's applications than any other suite outside of Microsoft themselves. Seems like ever since OO.o took off, Corel's been fading away. The only saving grace is if Apple designs Windows versions of iWorks or something like that. I mean, when you compare MS 2007 to others, MS is still far too overpriced, IMHO. Even their $150 basic H & S package is more than Corel wanted for their second tier office suite. Seems like you get what you pay for, I suppose...

I'm working in a all M$ environment where SQL-Server, Excel, Outlook and Exchange is king of the hill. Though the IT department is kinda openminden. For my own curiosity a question about macro's.

Regarding macro's:
1. Does OO support macro programming?
2. Which programming language is used for macro's?
3. how to make hellowWorld macro for OO Calc' which;
3.1 From within OO Calc spreadsheat, opens a new worksheet.
3.2 Writes the text "Hello World".
3.3. Makes the text bold font.
3.4 Save the sheet to a file in M$-Excel format?

Any1?

According to the help file, yes it does.


See below.

As for the rest of your questions - I've no idea - dont use macros.

However, this is what it says about Office macros :

Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org cannot run the same macro code. Microsoft Office uses VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) code, and OpenOffice.org uses Basic code based on the OpenOffice.org API (Application Program Interface) environment. Although the programming language is the same, the objects and methods are different.
If you use macros in one of the applications and want to use the same functionality in the other application, you must edit the macros. OpenOffice.org can load the macros that are contained within Microsoft Office files and you can then view and edit the macro code in the OpenOffice.org Basic IDE editor.

If you can't afford Office 2007 then try and grab an OEM copy of Office 2004 Pro from ebay.

Failing that, theres always Microsoft Works which comes with Word and a host of other applications similar to the full blown office 2007. Microsoft works is specifically designed for people on a low budget.

If I didn't have Office 2003 Pro I would still prefer to buy Microsoft Works instead of using Open Office.

oem 2003/4 are fine, but Works is absolute crap! (no offense intended amon, but it really is)

Theres no excel and is shipped with an old version of word, my mum had works at home and it caused her no end of frustration over using office at college (shes doing a basics course (how to switch the thing on etc :) )).

At least with OO.o she can at least open stuff saved at college and shes happier as its not nearly as limiting as works.

As for the oem thing, is that even legal? i though it was illegal to re-sell oem software (Kinda like reselling packets of crisps from a multipack) as the whole point is to provide a cheap version that is ONLY licensed on the machine it was supplied with.
You may find you do not own a valid licence if you buy it. I bought an oem nortons last year, i contacted their support saying i'd just bought it and had a problem. I was informed to stop using it immediately and they wanted to know the 'store' i'd got it from as it was not a valid license for sale, and refused to give me support...
Saying that tho', i continued to get updates for a year :/

neilo: Granted, you can do some nice things with Word and Excel, but creating attractive layout is far easier with Publisher. I remember generating a nice layout for a delivery note with Publisher which refused to import into Word (correctly). It just seems that interoperability is not a very good feature with Publisher.

It does have VBA (I completely overlooked this!) so I guess it could either be driven from Excel, or just automated on its own. If there was the Publisher equivalent of "Professional Excel Development" by Bullen, Bovey and Green, I would certainly buy it.

I'll have to stick with Excel though, as my place of work won't install Access, let alone Publisher :-(

I can work much better with OO for some simple reasons:
- documents are easily portable on different platforms (ie Win and Linux) because you can use the same programme
- doesn't have all that annoying stuff like drawing-area, when you want to insert some drawings
- (almost) always get a better result when tested for productivity and efficiency (can't find the source right now, might post it later)
- doesn't coast a pence

the only drawback I can make out is that it needs more time to start compared to M$ Office. But isn't it always the same? IE starts much quicker than FF or Opera.

And personally, I can't agree on the argument that OO Calc hasn't as many functions as Exel. I hardly never had any problems using it.

i use OpenOffice Portable in Vista and it works great! :-)

it does what I want and its free and thats good enough for me.

Oh,and the export as PDF option is a god send when firing invoices off through email.

EDIT:And being portable (OpenOffice Portable stands at 172mb) means it stays on my key-drive and I can do any business stuff whereever I want (in a fashion)

As i said in the other post:

A = All ms office can do for a fair few quid
B = all OO.O can do for free and on any OS
C = A-B

If anyone can tell me why C is worth the price of MSO off the shelf, ill go out and buy it myself!.
I consider myself to be a home/small business/use it at work person.

Since everyone has been waiting for my opinion before really getting this thread going: OpenOffice is wonderful. I can't think of anyway that is inferior to Office, and I can think of a couple things it does that are superior. Number one (which a couple people have mentioned) is the flawless transfer of files between any of the OSs that it runs on: Windows, Linux, MacOS, Solaris, FreeBSD. Try that with an Excel document and see how many times you have to convert it...then try and get the file back into Office! And it is free!

The one thing OpenOffice could add that would finally and completely end my dependency with Office is a Mail Client. I have tried many replacements for Outlook and they all fall short (I need my calender function).

Evolution?

Ed: Ah, ok, i think it may be linux only. I guess the only other one i can think of for windows would be palm desktop manager (suprisingly good and you get a free handheld with it! :P ) or something like that :/

Yeah, I'll be moving to a 100% Linux development platform after the big project is done. Until then I am suck with Windows.

I use Mozilla Thunderbird with the Lightning calendar extension.

Very handy.

Lighting? Never heard of that! Excellent...I'll give it a try! :)

Thank you for the tip!

I, for one, would prefer an external writing checker tool.
The development for it could be entirely focused on English grammar checking, for example, so with some love and a lot of time it could become quite a neat package. With that kind of feature pulled out to another program, it could also get away with other neat features like a plagiarism check.

These office suites are not modular enough; they pack way too much into the same place.

OpenOffice gets the job done, but the Linux desktop for example needs a word processor that (for one thing) actually tries to fit in with the desktop. (For example using the native colour picker widget - or a colour picker widget - at least!).
It's pretty weird, come to think of it. Neither Microsoft Office not OpenOffice have a GUI that blends with anything else in their respective platforms. On MacOS, though, we have NeoOffice (OpenOffice with some attention payed to GUI) and the Mac version of MS Office, both of which blend well.
Kind of dumb, hm?

I use OpenOffice daily in both Ubuntu and Windows, but I have never been impressed with its appearance. It is a shame, as OO obviously took a lot of work to get this far and it does everything pretty well, but it needs a lot of work to actually look like a seriously decent word processor.
You could say that looks don't matter, but there is a problem when the word processor has its own Themes which must be applied if somebody wants it to look like it uses their desktop's icon set. (Almost every other application on my computer uses my current icon set, except OpenOffice which must be changed separately).
This is an accessibility issue! What if a vision impaired person relies on Gnome's various themes for the vision impaired but can't use them in OpenOffice because it stupidly (and unnecessarily) uses its own icon set?
It also consumes space for no reason.


As for good features: It processes words and it does most of what MS Word does, sometimes better.
I highly recommend OpenOffice as an alternative to Word (Word is horrible as well), but I'm not saying it's the be-all-end-all (yet).

Do note that OO is *free*. What it does for what its price is, is most usefull for many small 1- or 3-man companies.



Too bad Thunderbird+Lightning cant sync with a Windows Mobile-based device (agenda, tasks, contacts).
Also, is there a way to sync Thunderbird+Lightning with a Java j2me based mobile fone --> mine is Samsung E900.

I use Sunbird for Calendar stuff. Apparently (haven't tried it myself) you can use a third party service, like zyb to synchronize across different architectures.

Oh and there's an new version (2.2) of OpenOffice.org up. New and improved and all that.

... Still lacks a grammar checking tool though.