Openoffice.org

[Thurston Garden]

Does anyone use this as their main office software?

My Mum has just replaced her old hand cranked desktop for a new one (with Vista ) and I am trying to keep her away from Planet Gates as much as possible.

Is Openoffice as good as other open source stuff like Firefox/Thunderbird?

Ta.

[John Headstrong]

yep, it is great. It does everything that MS office does, without the £130+ bill or dodgey serials.

it can export to PDF and can save has MS office format (and you can set it to do that by default)

I have even used college coursework for MS office with openoffice, there are differences but there are differences between office97 and office2007 and all those in between.

[hedgewitch]

I use Open Office and it's great - like John said, it does everything MS Office does.

[Thurston Garden]

Thanks both - just what I wanted to hear!

I would probably have it on my machine too, but my new job bought an upgrade to Planet Gates 2007 (£300+!) 'because everyone needs it'. I am actually doing quite well stopping the IT guy from putting Norton on my machine!

[John Headstrong]

I am actually doing quite well stopping the IT guy from putting Norton on my machine!

yep, I would fight the bloke (seriously, kicky punchy) I spent hours the other day getting rid of a rootkit on a fools... sorry friends PC, and it had norton on it, which I then scraped off and install some stuff that worked and didn't cost.

[Brij]

I know this topic was probably abandoned a while ago, but I looove openoffice.org

I type alot in French and German and it's really happy to let me change the keyboard settings so I can do so with as little fuss and as much speed as possible.

Apart from it not really supporting Arial Narrow, It's perfect. Once something's finished and ready for printing (on a uni Windows pooter), I export to .pdf and stick it on my USB stick.

[Thurston Garden]

My Mum is using it exclusively now on her new machine. She was dismayed to see that her old Word Christmas card labels file won't open properly..... I suggested she email it to me so I could open it in Word on my works machine, convert it to another format that OO could handle. Any suggestions as to what I should be saving it as?

Ta.

[Shirley]

will it open .rtf files?

Does this open office version of spreadsheets open up excel spreadsheets, and if saved once opened, can I reopen in Excel? I use a spreadsheet for the Neeps food co-op and not everyone has excel.

[Brij]

It handles .doc, .txt and .rtf perfectly well for me. .txt takes a bit of tweaking, since it wants to open it in a table, but I've coaxed it into doing that just fine. .pdf is fully supported on my system, but i don't think that's part of the standard openoffice.org package.

If the worst comes to the worst, I would .pdf any files that I want to transfer between systems that I don't need to edit at a later date. But having never made cards on a 'pooter I can't imagine what file type your xmas card headers are on to start with... but I'm surprised openoffice.org couldn't handle it... is your mum pretty good at tweaking this sort of thing to coax it into working?

[MKG]

It should open rtf files, but it's a bit flaky when processing them - best to load the rtf and save it in a different format. (I say flaky, but it's really no more flaky than MSWord is with the doc format).

As for Excel spreadsheets - no problems at all.

[Shirley]

I'm downloading it now - will give it a spin.

[Thurston Garden]

is your mum pretty good at tweaking this sort of thing to coax it into working?

erm...no lol

She only mentioned it on the phone the other night so I will need to get more chat from her I think.

[Shirley]

It's opened my word documents ok - it looks pretty good actually (and I have arial narrow :-))

[Shirley]

It does just what I need with spreadsheets too. It's great.

[Shirley]

I take it back - I can't seem to do the text filter which I use a LOT within excel. Anyone know how to do that?