I've been using OpenOffice.org for a few months now and it's going pretty well. One thing I noticed though is that the Find and Replace in Writer is not nearly as robust as the comparable feature in Word. I'm a pretty heavy user of Find and Replace especially when I'm collecting documents from multiple places into one document, or when I'm importing and exporting a document from different software.
In Word, it's pretty easy to do all kinds of tasks like looking for two paragragh marks that follow a period and replacing them with one paragraph mark that follows a period. In OpenOffice.org Writer, I don't have anywhere near the flexibility to do complicated Find and Replace operations that Word offers. I find myself opening a document in Word to do the operation, saving it, and opening it back up in OpenOffice.
I think my favorite feature of OpenOffice.org so far is the built-in ability to export to pdf. That works great. I made a nice drawing in Draw and I wanted to distribute it to a bunch of people, and there's no way I could count on them all having the same software to open the drawing, so I exported it to pdf and it looked and worked great.
Labels: OpenOffice.org, serious, text, unsolicited opinions
On a typical day I might use between three and five different computers. Usually four. I own all of those computers and I am responsible for buying the software on all of them. In the course of any given week, I regularly use eight computers, for four of them I have to buy software, for the other four I am not even able to install software if I wanted to.
I am getting tired of buying software from Microsoft for five different computer. A copy of Office Professional, which I need because I use Access a lot, costs about $500. That $500 buys two licenses, one desktop and one laptop. So at that rate, it would cost me $1500 to upgrade my computers to Office 2007. I'm sick of that.
I started to look around for altertnatives to Microsoft Office 2007 and I learned about OpenOffice.org. It's kind of a dumb name for a piece of software, with the .org at the end of it and all, but it's nice software. They say it's 100% Microsoft Office compatible, and it is also 100% free. You can install it on as many computers as you like, you can give it to your friends, you can use it as much as you want and it is free. There's no deluxe version that costs money, there's no expiration date, you just download the full version and use it. Any you don't pay.
The OpenOffice.org suite is roughly equivalent to the Microsoft Office 2007 Professional Suite. OpenOffice.org, like Office, has a few core components. OpenOffice comes with Base, Writer, Calc, Draw, Impress, and Math. Those are sort of equivalent to Access, Word, Excel, Visio, PowerPoint, and maybe Equation Editor.
All of the core components are designed to read and write to their Microsoft equivalents, in addition to being compatible with a wide variety of file formats. I've tried opening Access, Excel, Word, and PowerPoint documents from Office 2000 and Office 2003 and they open fine. Access doesn't open so well in Base, but all of the other Microsoft file formats seem to open fine in OpenOffice.org.
OpenOffice.org can read and write to many different file formats, but it's own native file format is a zipped XML format that is human-readable and completely open so that other applications can use it, too. It's the same file format that Google Documents uses, so there's a lot of compatibility between the two. That's actually how I got interested in OpenOffice.org in the first place, because I was reading about the Google Documents native file format.
OpenOffice.org can write all of it's documents to PDF. That functionality is built-in. It's not something you have to buy extra, and it doesn't use the PDF-printer type of workflow that other add-on PDF writers use, it's just a button on the OpenOffice.org toolbar. You just click it and you get a PDF out. That's particularly useful for Base reports, since it's kind of a pain to share Access reports electronically.
There is a portable version of OpenOffice.org, too. It's called OpenOffice.org portable. It's also free, and it runs completely from a flash drive. So you can plug your USB drive into a computer on which you're not even a local administrator, and run the software right from the USB drive. I've tried it on several different computers, and I can barely even tell the difference from the installed version.
I'm going to be trying OpenOffice.org out a lot ore the next year. I think I'm going to try to create all of my new documents in it as a test. If you want to try it, you can download it from . . . guess where?
OpenOffice.org.
Labels: OpenOffice.org, serious, text, unsolicited opinions