Open Office vs Microsoft Office

[richard mitnick]

I originally put Open office on my netbook, because I did not want to bother with hooking up my external optical drive. Open Office was so slow it was driving me nuts. So, I uninstalled Open Office.

I decided to take the long walk across the room and reach up and get my optical drive to load Office XP. I needed a rest from this totally fourteen step hike. While I was resting up, Office XP loaded Word, Excel and Access.

Each application opened in under five seconds as opposed to the laborious and resource draining Open Office which would take minutes to open an application and more minutes to open a file.

>>RSM
New Jersey weather: an early Fall, I think probably not. But we are under a cool high ridge of Canadian air sweeping down from the Plains of Abraham in Quebec Province. Cycling was terrific!!

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[iJohnE]

Richard: Nice weather.

I had OO on a 256MB ram machine, and it was horridly slow. However, on the same machine, I installed Office 2007 and it's blazing fast.

My thoughts are that maybe OO is a resource intensive program.

Oh, and I wanted to post, that my BONIC manager crashed today. Haven't been able to get it to work. Doing a re-install of Vista tonight, though.

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[Antony]

I have OpenOffice.org installed on this iMac (running Mac OS X 10.5.8). The selection and typing aren't as smooth as any other (normal) Mac OS X, but it works well. It is not as smooth looking either.

The reason I installed OpenOffice.org is to open 10+ years old documents created by Laurent in WordPerfect, and to convert them to Pages. I would like to thank Don for the recommendation.

Personally, I see that Apple iWorks has replaced the need for Microsoft Office, for most average people at least.

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[richard mitnick]

Antony-

Iworks is absolutely fine. However, Microsoft just "upped the ante", they are (soon) offering Outlook for Mac as part of Office. I have been an Outlook user since it came out in 1997. My biggest attraction to it was because I could build a large number of Contact databases. For me, at work, there was nothing else like it. Searchable by manufacturer, vendor, material items, whatever.

I do no use the Calender, Journal, any of those things. For storing email, it is not as good as it had been. I off-load all the email I want to save to TBird.

BTW, on the netbook, I did not choose to load Outlook, no need. There I use TBird for what little email that machine processes, just licenses and receipts for purchases of software for my music an video obsession.

>>RSM

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[richard mitnick]

John-

I have never through six different computer had BOINC crash out so badly I need to re-install anything. I am surprised.

I am using:
On Vista BOINC 6.6.36
On Vista WCG/BOINC 6.2.28
On XP Boinc 6.4.7

all with nary a problem.

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[iJohnE]

I let my cousin use my laptop, whilest it had no AV installed. I now have a virus, it's making everything crash.

Just going to reinstall and reformat. Although I may wait, as I ordered a bigger HDD for my laptop.

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[Edward]

What would make OpenOffice even better, is the addition of an e-mail program to compete with Outlook.

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[Don_HH2K]

What would make OpenOffice even better, is the addition of an e-mail program to compete with Outlook.

The open-source mail client market is already pretty well serviced. The default OpenOffice installs in most Linux distros already come with e-mail/PIM software like Kontact on KDE and Evolution on GNOME, and for everybody (including Windows users) else there's Thunderbird with Lightning.

I'm personally keeping Outlook around due to a lack of calendar sync bindings for Thunderbird and Palm OS.

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[Edward]

By default, at least on my laptop, when I tried sending a document via e-mail, Open Office displayed a message that it could not find an e-mail configuration...

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[BCPlanner]

I run MS Office 2007 on XP Pro and Vista boxes. I run Ubuntu 9.04 on the the same machine as Vista.
I installed Ubuntu & OpenOffice (same distro) because I am frustrated by MS constantly fixing what ain't broke (OSs and apps).
OpenOffice compares to MS Office - features and functions - in a word, "poorly." There are things MS Office and OS-related aps (e.g., Outlook/Outlook Express/MS Mail) simply do better.
There are apps under MS OSs that have no comparable (free) Linux application - example: desktop publishing.
The load times for apps under either OS seems about the same, and OpenOffice.org apps convert MS apps quickly and, from what I've seen, cleanly. MS can't convert OO.org, but OO.org CAN save files in MS format (albeit perhaps not the most recent).
In my daily life I am a heavy word processer user and a light user of spreadsheet and presentation (e.g., PowerPoint, Presentation). I also use some of the photo apps (the nod there goes to Ubuntu). I am not a gamer.
I cannot totally abandon MS products, but I am more-and-more using Linux' free apps and utilities; they just take some "getting used to."
Again, the switch primarily is do to MS mucking about with the UIs.

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[Fulvio]

I, never, had access to the Microsoft software, nor did I care to spend money on it, the choice was obvious.
I use Open Office to open Microsoft files, as well as a word processor. I don't need anything else. The question about e-mail is irrelevant to me, as I work with the the Firefox/Thunderbird combination.

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[richard mitnick]

Fulvio-

The the decider for me was that my experience was on the netbook, a low powered appliance rather than a computer. Open Office was just so impossibly slow in the absolute sense. In the relative sense, the difference between Open Office and MS-Office XP was blinding.

>>RSM

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[James]

That's been my experience as well. Open Office slowed down my last computer... almost to a crawl. With MS Office, however, I did not experience this.

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