Suggest an Office Suite to me...

[laxmanb]

... that help you in creating **good looking** documents. Both Office 2007 and Apple's iWork have an emphasis on documents that look slick. Any good FOSS alternatives?

[igknighted]

... that help you in creating **good looking** documents. Both Office 2007 and Apple's iWork have an emphasis on documents that look slick. Any good FOSS alternatives?

??

They all create the same documents. I personally like the new KOffice 2.0 (still in beta), but it doesn't support microsoft formats yet. OpenOffice is OK, StarOffice isn't bad and IBM has an office suite too (symphony?). Also available is Abiword and Gnumeric. Gnumeric is the best spreadsheet app I have used, and Abiword is a fairly simple, yet clean and fast word processor.

And if you want to learn a lot and have ultimate control, you can't beat latex.

[LaRoza]

I don't know what features you want, but I use OpenOffice and Abiword.

Abiword is simpler and faster, and I prefer it for what I do. I don't need it to be compatible with Word, but can save as and read .doc files, although some aren't happy with it.

[laxmanb]

If you've used Office 2007, there is a feature called SmartArt that helps in creating impressive and professional-looking diagrams. Also charts created in Office look better than those in OpenOffice(IMHO). And this extends to things like fonts, table and heading styles, etc in Office.

Is there an FOSS office suite which is concentrating on stuff like this?

[igknighted]

Sounds like you want a desktop publishing software... give scribus a try.

[urukrama]

Someone will suggest Latex ;-)

[SomeGuyDude]

I don't know what features you want, but I use OpenOffice and Abiword.

Abiword is simpler and faster, and I prefer it for what I do. I don't need it to be compatible with Word, but can save as and read .doc files, although some aren't happy with it.

Every time I have ever opened a document in AbiWord it looked like someone had put all the text in a box and shook it up.

I had a pretty simple document recently. 12 pages of writing, a page of endnotes, and a few illustrations on a page after the endnotes. Saved it as a .doc because it needed to be. When I opened the thing up? My endnotes were smashed into the same page with the illustrations, and the captions were all over the place, and the text formatting was just all wrong. The thing looked like hell.

AbiWord works if you're just typing a plain document with nothing else, but it falls apart any other time.

[bash]

Someone will suggest Latex ;-)

Emacs? ;)

[igknighted]

Emacs? ;)

Death to Emacs! Use Vi!

:P

[SunnyRabbiera]

another good one is koffice, koffice has a lot under the hood and looks fairly good.
Its got a lot of different tools in it so its pretty comprehensive, it has replaced open office for me pretty much

[rsambuca]

Every time I have ever opened a document in AbiWord it looked like someone had put all the text in a box and shook it up.

I had a pretty simple document recently. 12 pages of writing, a page of endnotes, and a few illustrations on a page after the endnotes. Saved it as a .doc because it needed to be. When I opened the thing up? My endnotes were smashed into the same page with the illustrations, and the captions were all over the place, and the text formatting was just all wrong. The thing looked like hell.

AbiWord works if you're just typing a plain document with nothing else, but it falls apart any other time.

I haven't had a lot of success with AbiWord either. It really doesn't like documents to be saved in any other format except its own.

[jimcooncat]

I'll second the Scribus bid on creating slick documents. Full Circle Magazine uses it, and has a very full series of articles on how they did it.

http://fullcirclemagazine.org/

OpenOffice and KOffice are probably your two best contenders for full office suites, but I don't think they'll match the big boys for usability (at least the US versions) for some time to come.

However (!) with Ubuntu, you're not limited by your pocketbook as to the tools available to you. There are lots of excellent tools available to you for doing individual tasks.

What we don't seem to have yet are the huge libraries of clip art and templates that you normally get with a paid-for office suite. But I think of it this way: why would I pay $80 for $15 worth of clip art?

[lancest]

Fedora includes Gnumeric by default. My experience: On 5 occasions I saw Gnumeric take 10 seconds or more just to save a file. This was on two different computers with good hardware. Also i thought I was smoking something yesterday and today when I realized some USB data was missing. I asked the community manager on Fedora Forums why they include Gnumeric and he said "I can't say I've ever seen a negative comment about Gnumeric before here" and later he said "This is not the place to report it"
Hey it's free software quit complaining!

[ikal]

i'm currently working with a heavily formatted fancy document one of my clients (i'm a translator) wrote in ms office 2003. while openoffice keeps "forgetting" the format and generally doesn't handle it very well, abiword leaves the formatting as it is so i can save the doc safely.

there are features in openoffice you might miss from abiword, but abiword is a perfect alternative. i recommend having both installed :)

[koleoptero]

I had abiword installed on my pc and when I saved in doc or odt it would remove all capital letters. :lolflag:

I understand what you mean about professional looking documents. You can create such with openoffice but it needs some extra work (in contrast with m$ office that does that easily). I believe it's good practice if you give it a try. And always export documents in pdf and view them in a pdf viewer to really see how they will be printed, cause they might look awful in OOo because of the lousy font rendering.

[50words]

Have a look through the repos (or just Add/Remove Programs). There are a lot of good things in there.

I can't speak for charts, but Office 2007's default styles and fonts are complete garbage. They don't look good, they are not readable, and even a first-grader should toss them.

If you really like the charts in either of those programs, use those programs in VirtualBox. If you don't have a copy of those programs, you will be able to find something, it just may mean that you have to do some of the work to create a template. If you do, please share. After all, the nice thing about iWork is that everything you make looks just like everyone else's!