Microsoft Office v Open Office

L

Louise

Good afternoon

Does anybody have any experience with 'open office'? I have been asked by
our IT Department to take a look at the appications within open office and to
give my opinion, ie. do they 'talk' to other Microsoft applications, are they
user friendly etc.

I have had a look at the word processing package, the eqivalent of Word, and
the first thing I have come across is that if a user e-mails an open office
document to sombeody that doesn't have open office, they can't open the
document via Word, they would have to have open office too.

Does anybody have any knowledge of this and do they know of any pros/cons
that I would need to be aware of?

Thank you.

louise
 
A

alessio.albano

Louise ha scritto:
Good afternoon

Does anybody have any experience with 'open office'? I have been asked by
our IT Department to take a look at the appications within open office and to
give my opinion, ie. do they 'talk' to other Microsoft applications, are they
user friendly etc.

I have had a look at the word processing package, the eqivalent of Word, and
the first thing I have come across is that if a user e-mails an open office
document to sombeody that doesn't have open office, they can't open the
document via Word, they would have to have open office too.

Does anybody have any knowledge of this and do they know of any pros/cons
that I would need to be aware of?
Click to expand...

Hi, I'm using OpenOffice 2.0 and Office 97 togetherm because I need
Access, that has not his corresponding on OO.
I found little incompatibility in .rtf and .doc managing, so the
background of the text, the bullets and some other thing aren't treated
in the same way and you can have problems when editing a document. I
had problems creating a document with OO, sending it to people that has
opened it with Word and again having to reopen the same document they
have sent to me.

With Calc I've not found that problems.

I've not used any other application from the package, except Base, but
only to test its capabilities.

Hope this informations has been useful, and excuse me for errors of my
english! ;)
Alessio
 
L

Louise

Hello
Thank you for your reply.
When you say you have had little incompatibility in .rft and .doc managing,
what exactly do you mean? How have you managed to e-mail a 'writer' document
to somebody that doesn't have Open Office and they have opened it in Word? I
haven't been able to do this, the document has been unreadable.

Again, thank you for replying.

Louise
 
L

Louise

Oooohhhh, you've saved it as a different file type.........! Doh, I never
thought of that.

Any more info you can give would be great.

Thanks again.
Louise
 
M

Mike

I download open office the other day and really have no problem with the word
processor and spread sheet. The database does not seem as good to me as
Access. We will probably move to Open Office and Filemake pro when we change
out our workstations and upgrade our back office software. Office and XP is
too hard for me to manage. We have 10 users so we can't afford a full time IT
person. If you are a IT person keep your company on Office for job security.

I want to run my business not my computers. I do like Server 2003 and I am
running it with terminal services so I could easily move my desktops to Macs
or Linux and run open office.
 
L

Louise

Thanks for this, Mike

Yes, I am an IT person, but I run the training department, not the
'engineer' side of things. What management are proposing to do is install
Open office onto the PC's of those who are not considered 'critical users',
so they don't have to pay for having Office installed for everybody. They
asked for my opinion because if some people are on office and some are using
open office, could I see it causing a problem.

At the moment, some people who are considered as 'non critical' only have
Word Viewer, Excel Viewer etc. but there are occasions where they do have to
create/edit documents too and at the moment, they can't do this. We are
hoping Open Office will be the answer to this?

Louise
 
A

alessio.albano

Louise ha scritto:
Thanks for this, Mike

Yes, I am an IT person, but I run the training department, not the
'engineer' side of things. What management are proposing to do is install
Open office onto the PC's of those who are not considered 'critical users',
so they don't have to pay for having Office installed for everybody. They
asked for my opinion because if some people are on office and some are using
open office, could I see it causing a problem.

At the moment, some people who are considered as 'non critical' only have
Word Viewer, Excel Viewer etc. but there are occasions where they do have to
create/edit documents too and at the moment, they can't do this. We are
hoping Open Office will be the answer to this?
Click to expand...

I think that most user haven't the correct mentality to approaching
problems. Usually I hear some like "it's not my job!" only to do a
copy/paste (really!!!) if it refer to an operation that they are not
used to do, like to add a signature for their mail client.

So using a new suite like OpenOffice will *surely* create problems, but
I think the change is a must.
Only if someone use Excel files that uses VBA code the job will be
harder.

For most needs about editing and creating document, I assure that
WordPad is perfect: couldn't you use it?

For compatibility, I use .rtf extension and *never* .doc. I love open
formats.
Your incompatibility I think is due to the new format .odt that I hope
will be soon used from all word processor (next Office will do it).

Hope useful, regards ;)

....omissis...
 
Top