openoffice.org opinions?

[mrdeeye]

Hey i just downloaded OpenOffice.org for my new PC...i was just wondering peoples thoughts on it....from what ive seen just messing around with it, it seems like itll take a little getting used to, but besides that it looks like i just found another part of my computer that i am no longer tied down to Microsoft with....its FREE....man i love that word.

[Mac Medic]

Open office is a fine program if you only intend to use it as a self contained package. What I mean is if you use any other 3rd party programs that import office documents it may not be the best choice. For example, Autocad can use text formatted as .asc from word or .prn from excel. Open office provides none of these options and is therefore pretty much useless to me. I could export from OO as formatted text, which autocad can handle but OO does not include carriage returns in it's formatted text ????? so the text is imported on a single line rather than as a paragraph, weird and no good for my needs, so i tend to stay away from it personally and use office but for general use it is a fine program.

[pam123]

I use abiword, it's been a part of OpenOffice for awhile now, and really like it.
It's compatible with M$ word so you'll have no trouble there.
I no longer use the whole Open Office Suite because I no longer need the whole thing but it was no problem when I did.

[eldon]

There is a good one that I use,PC Suite 602,its also free and easy to use.

[mrdeeye]

well...i dont really use any third party programs....all the stuff i have ever used MS OFfice for, school projects, etc...i never really had to import them into any other programs except other office apps

[MulderMan]

i use open office rather than M$ office, its just as good. wouldnt you think if you started off learning open office and someone put M$ infront of you, that would take a bit of learning wouldnt it? its just these days people treat M$ products as 'industry standard', and the more microsoft softwate on a network the 'better' it is - thats exactly how it is at my school.

[glc]

I tried it, and I liked it. The only reason I don't use it is there are certain operations that it doesn't support properly that M$ does the way I want - such as copying/pasting a range of Excel cells into a Word document table. As a note, I still use Office 97 because newer versions are just too bloated for my taste, I don't use Outhouse, and 97 does everything I need just fine. The HTML converter in Word 97 actually generates fairly decent HTML, but the same thing in Word 2000 generates bloated XML that creates pages that are 3 times the file size.