OpenOffice is a great free alternative and it has some pros and cons compared with Microsoft Office but MSO is totally dominating grammar and spell-check. Sometimes it’s also nice to just hand in the .doc without all the trouble with converting from .odt
The reasons why I don’t like MSO is
it’s made by Microsoft
It only runs properly on a Windows machine
I don’t want to use or buy Windows since it’s such a crappy operating system(a fact not an opinion)
I hate Microsoft because they’re always trying to force me to use Windows and because they are patent trolls but I would definitely have bought a Linux native Office 2003 version. How about you?
I voted other because of the most important reasons I use OO are:
a) it supports open standards (odt, etc.);
b) it runs on my OS;
c) it does what I want and I mostly understand what it does (I mostly did not understand what MSO did when I was forced to use it in my office);
c) and last, it is free, but paying for it would not stop me from using it.
And as my government supports the use of open standards I can send an .odt to the authorities, they have to swallow it. (It is not directly related to this, but our revenue service have a Linux program for the yearly income tax declaration available on their website).
I voted yes, because while I prefer Linux over Windows, I still find MS Office easier than OpenOffice (in part because of familiarity) plus the mentioned reason, not having to convert things to doc(x) when distributing to other people.
I use MS Office 2007 at work and find it is a pretty good version. There are issues of when it wants to do things “for you”, but OpenOffice has their own issues too.
One of the big differences I’ve found is the lack of a Publisher-like equivalent in OpenOffice with the same ease and intuitiveness. Scribus is powerful, but it is geared towards more professional users and is a little more raw. MS Word will suffice in a pinch, but still is not quite so easy.
It may be different, but the last time I tried Base, it was waaaay, far behind MS Access in terms of capabilities. MS Access is really a full development platform, between the tables (data), forms and reports combined with VBA capabilities.
So yes, I would be willing to purchase MS Office if it were a Linux native application. I’ve tried it through Wine and it just hasn’t worked the same.
Once Office would be made available, then I would be watching for Visual Studio to work natively with Mono and I’d be in pig heaven! That would basically remove 99.9% of my Windows needs!
On Mon, 2010-02-15 at 19:06 +0000, Searching for Answers wrote:
> OpenOffice is a great free alternative and it has some pros and cons
> compared with Microsoft Office but MSO is totally dominating grammar and
> spell-check. Sometimes it’s also nice to just hand in the .doc without
> all the trouble with converting from .odt
That’s a SCHOOL problem (assuming that’s what you meant).
Remember, there ARE places where ODF is the STANDARD format… and
not Microsoft’s formats.
>
> The reasons why I don’t like MSO is
> - it’s made by Microsoft
> - It only runs properly on a Windows machine
Eh… it doesn’t run bad under wine… depends on version of MSO.
>
> I don’t want to use or buy Windows since it’s such a crappy operating
> system(a fact not an opinion)
Ok.
>
> I hate Microsoft because they’re always trying to force me to use
> Windows and because they are patent trolls but I would definitely have
> bought a Linux native Office 2003 version. How about you?
Well, I don’t like it because of the hidden fees and the forced
fees for upgrading… but regardless, I’d just use OOo and convert
to whatever format “they” want. But that’s just me.
In general, Windows users install a LOT of BAD software. You can
certainly argue that OOo is an example of good software… so why
can’t the recipients install OOo?? Especially given all the
garbage they’ve installed already (OOo is better than most of the
other things they’ve installed).
I rarely need to use an office suit and therefore buy one. If i need to edit text i use something simple like Kate or for more complex editing i use OOo or Google Docs.
I don’t see the advantages of using MS Office over the free open source alternatives.
I do not wish to support Microsoft’s proprietary format for documents.
On Tue, 2010-02-16 at 01:36 +0000, Penguinclaw wrote:
> My wife is a legal secretary and she much prefers OOO. Me I’m simple I
> like the new Koffice:P
>
>
Koffice architecturally, beats the snot out of OOo. So… as it
matures it (should) become the lightweight yet more feature laden
office productivity package… ideally.
Besides, since Sun GAVE UP (sorry but they did it to themselves),
some of the future of OOo could be in question.
I voted No - for other reasons. If this was asked about 5-6 years ago then I may have voted yes as OO.o was a little behind and limited then in comparison. But now OO.o does everything I need.
IBM’s Symphony (OpenOffice fork) has a nicer interface than OpenOffice, but very heavy the last time I tried it.
The good side is that if Oracle kills (whether the quick death, or slow unsupported death) OpenOffice, then Symphony and GoOO may be able to take its place.
The bad side is that depending on how they are developing it, they may be able to charge for it.
No, but I would gladly buy all the fonts that are present in Microsoft Products
The only pro’s I see which favor MS Office are:
Eye Candy
Ease of Usage
Increased Productivity for retards
I do own a Microsoft Office Student, but I stopped using MS Office some time ago. The only issue I had was to take a pen into my brothers laptop and snatch microsoft fonts so that I could turn in papers in word format (as requested by my university) without having problems.
Most universities I know that don’t operate inside the IT scope have nice agreements with companies like IBM, Microsoft and such to bound students to their tools, cheap example:
IBM SPSS > Alternative: PSPP
Why should we use PSPP if it’s unstable and SPSS Licences are offered to my university students? When they hit the work markets, they will be bound to SPSS, and thats revenue for IBM
Microsoft does it at low level starting at very beginning of your student life with Office.
It’s about time someone can throw down our governaments and establish new guardians to ensure a nicer future for us, killing the domination of Federal Reservers and Central European Banks, send a battalion of space marines to assassinate the International Banking Lobby, Builderberg, Masons, etc… and take back what is ours before all is lost.
At work I have quite a capable machine a Lenovo T61P. It came with Vista Ultimate, which was downgraded to XP by our corporate IT dept. Go figure. Predictably the corporate standard is the M$ Office suite. However, I have the Sun odt plugin installed, which allows M$ Office to read from and save odf files. Further I have Virtual box installed, which allows me to run a variety of Linux’s from within XP. The Linux guests share the local folders with the host system.
At home I’m pure Linux, I access M$ Office applications and my corporate Outlook account via Citrix, which also gives me access to the corporate network drives. So at home I can also have M$ Office and OOo open on the same desktop too.
In order to facilitate smooth interoperability between M$ Office and OOo I have found these steps helpful:
Install Windows fonts in Linux, if you have a Winblows license sticker on your PC or are dual boot you can do this without violation of the Windows license.
Save Office templates as OOo templates so that margins, spacing, fonts etc. are all the same.
Anchor tables, graphics, pictures etc. to a character as opposed to a page or paragraph, they will then always be in the right place on transfer.
You can then save in odf or office formats and it shouldn’t make much of a difference. Very occasionally you might see something but it usually relates to graphics formatting.
