Open office

[tgrier]

Hello....

First... I am business man not a Software guy...
but.. I love to tinker around and learn new things on my computer.

Well.. I recently - about a 6 months ago...
switched from IE to FireFox
then to Sunbird and Thunderbird
in an attempt to not use outlook.... I hate that program for some reason...

anyway.. that is all to say... I downloaded and started using Open office... and everything is fine....but .. I guess my question is this.
1. There is a small learning curve with Open office from Office.
2. Is it worth taking the time .. when I have office on my computer? ....
3. I want to support and use open source stuff but I do not want to use a dying program....

I do not have many techo Geeks as friends .. or I would ask them....

Thanks for your feeedback.

One of my cocerns with OO is I cannot find a support forum like this one fore it ..... which I learn so much from places like this....

Thank you for your answers...

T

[dang]

Open Office is far from dying. They made great inroads. I've only used it on linux though, so I'm not sure how the windows version does. I do know that there are still some format issues moving documents between ms office (in particular Excel) and OO.

OpenOffice does have a support forum, available at http://www.oooforum.org/. They also have a lot of tutorials and other documentation at http://support.openoffice.org/index.html#fcs.

I'm sure if you posted any particular questions about OpenOffice here that you would come some good responses.

However, if you have office already on your computer, then the desire to use OpenOffice is purely up to you since it the need to use is no longer really a "need". It's more about just supporting OpenOffice.

I would play with common documents you use on a daily basis there at work and see if you can open the documents in OpenOffice and still maintain the formatting. Then make changes and save in OpenOffice and see if you can open the newly saved doc in MS Office w/out losing formatting. By doing this, you can ensure that your co-workers wont be pulling their hair out when attempting to load documents from you, and vice versa.

If you use spreadsheets, make sure graphis, formulas and other important data is kept as well.

[tgrier]

AWesome... this is the info I needed.... thank you...

Your work here is great....BTW.....

I am going to review and hopefully... choose to use OO.
T

[Archon]

aye, Open Office is pretty good, I have had some transfer issues.. for instance, my friend had a document he did on oo, but on word, it was a mess

[llbbl]

I like open office also. Too bad not very many people use it. Firefox has made more headway into the browser market than Open Office has in the office suit market. OO is able to import documents fine but when you make changes in the program you are going to run into issues when trying to open it with MS Office. I have heard that a solution for when you want to share documents is to save them in RTF. Nice thing about OO is you can save stuff as PDF directly from the program.