How good is Open Office?

Question

Okay, seriously...I'm still using my Office '97. :-P

Nothing that I do other than just Resumes when I was looking for a job (I have one now), and occasional random documents where I needed to type something or open a document in Word format that someone sent me.

The famous "Open Office" program seems to look just like Microsoft Office and seems to do the exact same thing. What are the specific differences between Open Office and the real Microsoft Office? Is Open Office backwards compatible with Microsoft Office, and vice versa? If I send a document to someone that I created in Open Office...can they open it with their Microsoft Office programs? If they send me something that they created with the regular Microsoft Office program...can I open it with Open Office without any problems?

What are the basic pros and cons of Open Office? Does it take up less space on the hard drive than Microsoft Office? I'm not worried about the space...but I've been wondering if it would just be better for me to get the free Open Office version rather than keep using my Office '97. What do you think?

Note: Yes, I AM being cheap because I don't need Microsoft Office for all of the uses that many business people need it for. I use it for home/personal use only, and very rarely...so it's useless for me to go out and buy it for $200 bucks.

Answer 1

If you need it to do so Open Office will MIMIC ms office. If you need a word doc it will save it as a word doc.

http://www.openoffice.org/  And... it works on all computers

Answer 2

Open Office is pretty much the same as Microsoft Office, except it's free and open source. Someone who has MS Office can read your text files written in OO as long as you save in the right format (Any MS Office format), and you can read documents created in MS Office in OO.

http://www.openoffice.org/

That's the official website. You don't need to worry about viruses.

Answer 3

Open office is free and do the exact same thing as Microsoft Office. What I like most is you can save your document in many different format by clicking 'save-as' .. .doc .rtf  .pdb (Palm) ..  

Answer 4

It is a better suite than MS. As long as you save all your documents into the MS format anyone can read them. Use file/save as/Microsoft Office 97 2000 .doc

Answer 5

You will find a “Migration Guide” at http://documentation.openoffice.org/manu... which gives a good idea the main differences, though written from the point of view of OpenOffice.org supporters of course.

It does some things better than Microsoft Office and some things worse. Whether you find it better or worse than Microsoft Office depends on which of those things are most important to you.

The best place to download it is from the official website at http://www.openoffice.org/ . There are some sites that provide bad versions, but mostly sites that attempt to sell it to the unwary at a price. This is perfectly legal. You can sell any open-source software at any price you can get. But it is hardly ethical. There have never been any trojans or viruses associated with the official version. Remember, the main company behind OpenOffice.org is Sun Microsystems, who are at least as reputable as Microsoft, or IBM or Apple and provide a number of free products.

The product is actually called “OpenOffice.org” not “Open Office'', partly for legal reasons. There was already another products called “Open Office”. For the connotations of this name see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source... . Most of the programming is done by paid programmers, mostly paid by Sun Microsystems. Sun sells a slightly different version called StarOffice which has some proprietary extras and includes paid suport. See http://www.sun.com/software/staroffice/i... . But the OpenOffice.org version of the products is entirely open source code, so that even if Sun were to drop out, it would still be legal for anyone to distribute or expand the code.

Indeed there are at this time five forks of OpenOffice.org that I am aware of, where people have taken OpenOffice.org’s source code and produced their own versions for various reasons. Of course, if you do this, you must make your code open source, which means that the original OpenOffice programmers can also use it, if they want.