After just watching the Gadget Show on bravo I was just wondering which package everyone prefers.

Microsoft Office (Costing £350) OR

Open Office (Costing £0.00) http://www.openoffice.org/

I suppose Open Office would be every home users choice as long as they do not have Microsoft Office already. To be honest I think that Open Office is good but it isn't as good for some projects as Microsoft Office, although there is a HUGE difference in price.

I used to use ms office and then tried open office, at first I thought I could never switch because I was so used to ms office and found some things harder in open office. I then found I needed some of the things offered by open office such as pdf export, flash slideshow export and through using these I switched completely to open office.

Some of the things I found frustrating have now been fixed in the latest beta of open office (2.0 I think) such as word counts that are easy to get to.

I only have office 97 to compare this too as I simply cannot justifiy the expense to upgrade to any newer version. It was also the last microsoft program (other than messenger) that I've switched over to open source, it's all part of my plan to switch completely to Linux before Longhorn comes out.

Grant

Open Office is a great example of what can be achieved with Open Source software but MS Office is a better piece of software.

thats what i thought

Originally posted by RJ45
MS Office is a better piece of software.


Care to elaborate?

IMO MS software if often over-inflated bloatware that will bleed your system dry of resources.


I've used Works & Office in the past & found both to be limiting in many areas. Then there's the over-inflated prices attached to a MS license.



I've also used OO (since it was star office suite) and only Star Office Suite has been worse than Works or Office. OO is far superior (in many ways) and you can work on just about any format without loss of formatting (unlike MS Orrifice) - Damn! My dislike of MS has crept in again;) and I was determined to keep this reply as neutral as I could:(.

I tried StarOffice once back in 1999, because Microsoft Office became bloated and expensive.

The wannabe hippy / linux-on-a-386 brigade told me StarOffice was great. Not only was it free, it had 'document compatability with Microsoft Office' and 'keystroke compatability with Microsoft Office'.

I foolishly took this to mean the user interfaces would be exactly the same; the only difference would be the application said 'StarOffice Word' instead of 'Microsoft Word'.

BIG MISTAKE!

Not only was StarOffice as bloated as MS Office (200mb disk space, I think?), it was even more sluggish than MS Office (on a Pentium 200 running Windows 95) and crashed the first time I used it.

The user interface was even worse than Adobe Illustrator 4 for Windows (and that was bad).

Fortunately for me, the uninstall wizard worked perfectly!

A couple of years later, our company considered switching to a later version, to save on the £300-odd each cost of Microsoft Office licences, but stupid little things such as:

1) StarOffice using non-standard fonts for the user interface causing viewing problems, and

2) the not-quite 100% Microsoft Word compatability with complex documents with embedded images as well as

3) the potential retraining time required

meant we stuck with Microsoft Office.

I have heard that OpenOffice is significantly better than StarOffice was, but once bitten... :nono:

And no, I don't work for Microsoft

I like open office - lots of room on screen, interface is a bit cryptic coming from MS Office but thats a time thing, and for the daily user I would heartily recommend it.

There are bound to be problems with some word files (Microsoft have made sure of that) but if you stick to rtf things work pretty well for the most part.

And you don't get a huge sack of **** that you don't need as part of the install.

And it's free. And regularly updated. And has a growing library of free bolt ons.

And it really doesn't suck the resources as hard as office (outlook anyone? gnnnnnnnn)...

For an individual, its hard to see a reason for shelling out 350 quid for something that does about the same thing but treats you like an idiot.

For anyone accustomed to installing and using windows products, it should be a snap.

Ok background - I've used every MS Office since version 97 and have been using Openoffice since 1.0.

IMHO both are good products, MS Office 2003 is now (finally) mature and is a good business product and of course it tends to be the default 'productivity' software that Small Medium Enterprises (and larger ones) choose. So if you want something that will produce a document in the correct format for 95% of business to look at then this would be a good package.

The drawback is the cost and personally I wouldn't pay £350 for it. Thankfully I don't have to as my employer is kind enough to pay for a copy! If you don't want to pay for it then there are ways - ask your employer to check their licensing - certain licensing schemes allow employees to have a copy for free. If your not so lucky, then if your kids are in education or you are, then you should be able to get student edition (it's cut down but it's got the important bits).

Openoffice used to be a little 'clunky' - that's my opinion, the interface wasn't great and the tools were just darn right frustrating at times. But then it was free so I stuck with it and yes it produced every document I wanted. I'm now using the V2.0 beta and it's good, it's more refined and the interface is a whole lot better. Sure you do have to set a few things up like what file format you want to save it in, but otherwise it works 'out of the box'.

I've now got both on my machine - MS Office as Outlook syncs with my Ipaq and I just went with a complete install, and OpenOffice 2.b beta as I wanted to see how the new version was looking. Which do I use when I want to write a letter or create a presentation?... Well I use open office, I just like some of the stuff it has and well lots of people have worked their spare time to put something into it so I support them by using it.

In the end use open office - the worst can happen is that you don't like it. If you spend £350 on MS Office and don't like it then that's a lot of money you could be spending on other things.

yeah. i have done the same as you torin8 so I dont have to pay for it. Well. Also, i have a big enough hard drive to not neeed to worry about the memory that MS Office sucks from it. I also think that the 2003 version is much better than the other versions and that the online function helps a great deal.

I like Open Office but I've switched back to Word for ease of use and compatabillity.

Open Office is good for work places etc that can't afford hundreds of MS licences.

The new versions (6 and 7) of StarOffice are much better than the earlier ones.

The latest OpenOffice is fantastic - especially the database program. You can create an SQL database with the wizards in just minutes.

It's certainly worth learning on "Open" and "Star" because pretty soon businesses are not going to pay the huge costs tha Microsoft demand, and if you can show you have experience with these products you may stand out from someone who doesn't.

I got my current job because it required knowledge of Star Office as it was to be deployed to the 500+ machines we have, and I'd been using OpenOffice for some time.

Well I've been using open office 2.0 for a fair while. I've completely removed the Windows stuff with the exception of Access as I need to use that for an old albatross of a project that kinda lingers.

Outlook is useful if you like that sort of thing (I dislike it immensely - still it fails to send 'properly' MIME formatted email, I guess it's useful if you need receive email from other outlook users) I now have a clear conscience and a couple of gigabytes free.

Thanks Open Office!

I have recently been subjected to the awful mess that is open Office at work! It has turned a 1hour task every monday into a 2hr task thanks to the frustrations it brings.

Using it makes me realise why it is free, and also makes me thankful that I have the full office suite at home!

Unless OpenOffice has an equivalent to VBA then it's no good as a replacement in our office.

I use OpenOffice (2.?) at home - it is good enough for me.
MS feels better sometime (use at work), but other times prefer OO.

What little features I dont have (have not yet found) in OO, I dont mind losing in exchange for the £300 or so I saved in not buying MS for home machines.

in all this people seem to forget two things

1: the ONLY reason M$ office is popular IS because it comes with most pcs
2: the security aspect, dont forget EVERY micro$haft program is riddled with bugs and security holes

Microsoft Office is the better piece of software.

But I cant afford it.... and quite frankly open office works for me so I use it.

MS Ofice will always win, but if i had to pay i would go for open office every time.

Used ms for years now, but would never pay what they ask for it (can i say that on here?)

I use Open Office. When there is something I need that something that open office doesn't do I'll look at MS Office. (Or google apps, or abiword, or kword, or kcalc etc...)

Until then, I rely on the export as PDF function too much. (For invoicing.)

I think fans of Lotus 123 and Word Perfect would prefer Open Office.