Anyone Using Open Office?
 

The title says most of my question. I have a new small laptop, no DVD drive, plenty of processor power, hard drive space and RAM. I certainly need a Word compatible program just for opening up attachments in emails while on the road. Does Open Office really take the place of MS Office?

I use open office in Mac to view ms word document. Sometimes it mess up the page margin.

I've used both Write, the word processor (Word) and Impress, the presentation (PowerPoint) portions of Open Office. I haven't had any problems with Write, but Impress has messed up after going back and forth to PowerPoint a few times. If you're going to use it as your primary program and aren't going to send it on to someone with MS Office, you should be fine, especially if you save the files in the Open Office native format.

IMHO, not really. OpenOffice is overpriced even though the cost is nothing. For basic word processing it's okay but I find it glitchy and as 9Benua stated, formatting tends to get messed up. Have you tried the MS Office Word Viewer? It lets you open up MS Word documents in read only format.

I use OpenOffice and GDocs exclusively now. It's fine for my purposes.

I have open office on a home computer with Windows 7. I also use the Draw program on my work XP laptop for the few times I need simple flow charts in place of Visio. It has served me pretty well in those instances. I can't comment on how well it allows you to go back and forth with MS files. I also downloaded an add in for MS Office that allows me to open ODF (Open Office Files) files into MS Office. That works well. If your other computers allow you to install that, it can be a decent solution. If you are looking for a program that will let you open basic office docs and do simple editing, I think you are on the right path. After all, it is free and you can always try something else if it doesn't work.

PT

I used Open Office both with Windows and on my Mac. Recently, I have had better success with NeoOffice, another open source Office emulator.

I use LibreOffice (an alternative version of OpenOffice with a few of the non-GPL copyrighted parts removed) on my Linux machines. For basic word processing and spreadsheet work, it's just fine and better than the earlier Linux programs I was using (AbiWord and Gnumeric.)

Formatting conversions to/from Word are far from perfect, although IME it's just not as big an issue as it used to be: if I need something in an exact format, it's easy to go from either LibreOffice (on Linux) or MS Office (on Windows) to PDF and be 99.9% certain that it'll look the same on the recipient's screen.

The PowerPoint replacement is nearly useless, however.

Then you need MS word viewer (free download from Microsoft). This lets you view, print and even copy all Word format documents. Much faster and more reliable than OpenOffice (which often runs into documents that it cannot handle correctly). MS seems to go to a lot of trouble to put OpenOffice out of business :)

open office is great. word viewer would work for you too, but if you ever need to do any simple editing or whatever, oo is perfect, as is google docs.

neooffice is oo + mac front end (mac compatible menus, etc), but now that oo has a native mac front end, you don't really need neooffice any more. I have both, I can't really tell the difference between either one or those + google docs. They all work fine for me. I don't even bother using "open with" any more to pick one vs the other, they are really indistinguishable, if you keep them both up to date. At this point, just pick the one you like better. neooffice has a slightly better updater I think.

-David

For basic document viewing and word processing it's probably fine. I eventually gave up on it, though, after finding out how deficient the spreadsheet and database modules (Excel and Access clones) were. I also do regular mailmerges, and getting those set up in OpenOffice isn't anywhere near as easy as in Word.

I use OpenOffice for my netbook just as the OP suggests, to read and assess documents sent as email attachments.

For this purpose, it is perfectly effective.

Another Open Office user. Have MSOffice on my main laptop and Open Office on my netbook for traveling. I use it for writing and spreadsheets.

i've been using ooo for years now and it's perfectly stable and does virtually everything i can throw at it with Writer.
Calc is good but I still use Excel occasionally (with work that originated in Excel).
Impress is OK but I'm in the camp that says PowerPoint just rots the brain.
Draw is fine for what it is - a basic drawing package.
Don't use Base much but when I've needed to read the occasional basic Access DB, it's worked fine.

If you're not writing a book, with all kinds of tables of authorities, indexes, mathematical equations and all kinds of weird specific formatting that you have to share/collaborate on with people using Word, you'll be fine. If you were all doing that in ooo, you'd be fine too....

I have been using OO for years. Also use MS office.
OO calc has bailed me out several times in recovering LARGE excel files that contain many formats etc...
I have problem opening RTWFares.xls with Excel, but no problem with oo calc. Go figure.