Do they link up perfectly or is it more akin to iWork and MS Office? I am currently playing with Open Office and it seems bloody brilliant, with a nicer interface then both iWork or Office and best of all it’s FREE!

Yep it does and has the benefit of being in the actual Open Document Format as opposed to the MS bribed version.

Compatible with Google docs too.

You can export to MS formats or PDF so no issues there.

Some will come along and poke fun and explain it’s ok but… if all you want to do is write stuff and use some spreadsheets then go for it, it also unlocks password protected MS docs

It opens and saves to ms office formats fine. It also has its own formats, which take far less memory space.
I’ve not noticed any problems yet but maybe more complicated spreadsheets could be an issue.

Compatible with Google docs too

We are moving all our ‘Word’ type docs over to Google – makes such sense, especially now they are all shared on Google Drive.

It’s all we use at work.
Only prob can be some powerpoint presentations hat go a bit haywire.
Try checking out the newer LibreOffice – which IIRC has superceded OpenOffice.
Been using it for over 4 years and seldom have issues other than that one.

word documents are fine.

Be very careful if you use Excel for anything more complicated than biscuit tin refilling schedules.

Been using StarOffice/OpenOffice for years and it’s improved a lot. LibreOffice is better still, I have seen some issues with presentation formatting going between M$ and LibreOffice but tend to export to PDF anyway so it’s all good. Not a big spreadsheet (power) user but the little I do do seems to translate OK.

It all works fine so long as you use it as the only solution. If you start mixing and matching microsoft there’s some pretty gaping flaws (powerpoint animations and slide transfers get lost/cocked up, word docs sometimes get re-formatted due to things like font changes).

Perfectly acceptable for most users though. It’s standard kit at work, but then Office is too so we can choose.

Thanks, I’ll mainly be using the word processor and presentation software. I’ll have a look at Libre Office. Why is something so good free!

I borrowed a laptop for a while when mine was in the repair shop, used Open Office. My new freshly Microsoft Office 2010’d laptop was fine with it all apart from the spreadsheets, which it just would not open, and I wasn’t doing anything too tricksy.

Most things export/import OK. Fancy formatting can get lost (for some reason if I paste a graph from “Open Office Calc” in “Open Office Writer” and save as Word.doc some people can’t see it (but not all) and I also get problems with pasting graphics (e.g. a flow chart thrown together in Open Office Draw and pasted in). Likewise things like vertical text in excel spreadsheets and “forms” give headaches in both OO and Google docs.

My personal preference is Abiword, and Gnumeric – but not sure if they are available on Windows easily. They offer almost as good cross compatibility and are, for 99% of the things people do, much cleaner / nicer to use.

The killer is is you need anyone else’s ‘plugin’ modules, macros etc as most won’t work.

I used it a while back, then I decided £70 was worth it for MS Office. One of the best value £70 you can spend in the IT world I reckon, when you consider what you get.

Is LibreOffice only 2 weeks old as per the wiki page. As it is open source should we expect fixes for the buggy bits.

tails – Member

Is LibreOffice only 2 weeks old as per the wiki page. As it is open source should we expect fixes for the buggy bits.

No, it was forked from OpenOffice at least a year back. I think shortly after the time Oracle bought Sun.

Edit: first release 28 September 2010 according to wiko.

It’s stable anyway which is I think what you want to know.

Thanks retro83 that was what I wanted to know!