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ThePainter
February 26th, 2005, 12:06 PM
Hi,
I would just like to blow a bit sunshine up Open Office.

I am at colledge at the moment doing BCS Level 2 IT which is using Microsoft Office so I thought I needed Office to do homework and have been either dual booting XP or using CrossOver Office to use Microsoft Office.

Yesterday I thought Id try to use Open Office cos it claimed to be compatible with Office so I ran through my Spreadsheet course work using Open Office and I was impressed.
There are a few little differences like where the tools are and I found that when doing IF functions you must seperate with a ; instead of , but this corrected automatically if you open the files in the opposite program without a problem and you have to activate the header and footer to use it.
I even found a few tools that are on the tool bars that you use a lot where as in Office you have to hunt the menus for them.
And of course there are a few more tools that are missing in Office.
So with a bit practice you can use open office as a replacement quite easily.

Some of you might say "So what ?" but a lot of the people I am at college with use Office at work and are having to go to the loacal library or into the college if a room is empty to do their homework for the simple reason that they cant afford Office at home and a lot of their XP systems come with Microsoft Works which isnt compatible with Office. (Thats good of Bill isnt it )

So I will be spreading the good news on monday night that they can get a free compatible office suite and with any luck they will realise they are being treat like fools by Microsoft and come over to linux and if they do then Ill be there with my UBUNTU advice to direct them in the right direction. O:)

And up to know I have found Gimp to be as powerful if not more than Paint shop pro 9 which is bloated out with loads of useless tools that I cant find a use for and if I try to use the older PSP's they crash all the time due to Microsoft updates.

One more thing, since XP SP2 was installed on my dual boot I have found loads of programs I use to use a lot dont even start up anymore and Explorer crashes more than usual so I have installed Litestep and am getting less probs but I have only had to boot into XP once in the last week for about 5 min's so Im not worried about XP problems.

OK has anyone else got any good experiences since joining UBUNTU or linux ?

KiwiNZ
February 26th, 2005, 11:50 PM
I agree with your view of Open Office. And 90% of MS Office users use only 10% of the suites functionality yet they fork out all that cash for things they will never use . Yet they could download for free or get for a cost of around $10 a suite that is just as good or better.

Except , one annoying feature , it is so slow at starting and that should have been fixed by version 2 as it was present in the preview point releases before V1. Bad bad OO.O devs .[-X

DJ_Max
February 27th, 2005, 01:42 AM
I agree with your view of Open Office. And 90% of MS Office users use only 10% of the suites functionality yet they fork out all that cash for things they will never use . Yet they could download for free or get for a cost of around $10 a suite that is just as good or better.

True, most people just use the basic features, something to type up a report, or view a PowerPoint presentation.


Except , one annoying feature , it is so slow at starting and that should have been fixed by version 2 as it was present in the preview point releases before V1. Bad bad OO.O devs .[-X
It starts up pretty fast for me. Even installed from a binary. Did you compile from source, or install from a .deb?

KiwiNZ
February 27th, 2005, 01:52 AM
It has been the same on many OS's My current Linux Distro is Fedora Core 3 ( :oops: I just cant get warty to load and hoary is too buggy) and OpenOffice is slow to open. It is the same in Windows XP and we experienced the same when we evaluated for Work on Win2k network.
Its one of the few things that lets OO.O down.

ThePainter
February 27th, 2005, 06:24 PM
Hi,
On my XP system I find Office starts up slower than Open on my UBUNTU.

A nasty trick from microsoft is that they use to supply a Word reader for free for those who receive .doc files similar to the way Adobe do for .pdf's but now you have to buy Office to read them.
At least you can still get a Power Point viewer but I bet Big Bill's got plans to scrap that one.

I think a lot of people in this economic climate still have the misconception that free means rubbish and expensive means quality.
Shame isnt it ? http://www.thepainter666.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/pics/pm(14).gif

darkoptix
February 27th, 2005, 09:53 PM
When I started doing labs in chemistry, I used Open Office because of the better way of typing equations out.
Also, Open Office allows me to make .pdf files, and on Windows, I couldn't do that.

allans
February 27th, 2005, 10:00 PM
I find the load times pretty bad too, other than that my only problem with it is that gnome intergration could be better, although this would no doubt require a lot of work, it's just a shame that the nearly everything in the ubuntu desktop follows this style except some of the (arguably) most used applications.

mark
February 28th, 2005, 02:05 AM
Agreed, OO.o takes a while for the first load. However, I will also say that the first-time load of an MS Office component on my W2K system at work (after one of many required reboots during the day!) takes an inordinate amount of time, as well.

When you look at the cross-platform nature of OO.o, well - "the amazing thing about a dancing bear is not how *well* it dances, but that it dances at all."

ThePainter
February 28th, 2005, 09:37 AM
Hi,
My College course also cover Microsoft Access, which is a database program.
OO.o doesnt have a database program in the suite.
Is there a Linux database program similar to Access and with compatible file format if possible ?

JsPr
February 28th, 2005, 10:11 AM
Regarding the startup time. I suppose that you have heard of the open office quickstarter applet? You can find it in Synaptic (Universe I think). It sits on your panel and really speeds the startup process, I thing it preloads OO in memory.

ralph_ubuntu
February 28th, 2005, 10:35 AM
Hi,
My College course also cover Microsoft Access, which is a database program.
OO.o doesnt have a database program in the suite.
Is there a Linux database program similar to Access and with compatible file format if possible ?

Not really, but there are several projects that aim to provide easy to use frontends to databases:
http://www.koffice.org/kexi/ (still in early development afaik)
http://www.knoda.org/
http://www.rekallrevealed.org/kbExec.py

On top of that, OO2 will have something similar to Access:
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=20293
and a preview of OO2 is already in hoary.

As to file formats being compatible, check out http://sourceforge.net/projects/mdbtools/