[Ti] OT - Open Office

[Chris Olson]

On Wednesday, March 5, 2003, at 11:32 AM, Chris Reinhart wrote:

> Sorry if this has been covered here already but I'm looking for 
> advice, opinions, likes/dislikes regarding openoffice?
> We are looking for alternatives to microsoft's expensive office suite 
> to install on our client ibooks.

OpenOffice is fine for most simple word processing and spreadsheet 
tasks.  However, it won't properly format Word documents with images or 
tables, it doesn't support the same fonts as MS Office in either 
spreadsheets or word processing documents (so formatting will be lost 
when importing docs), the UI positively sucks, and it is quite slow.  
Personally, I would not deploy it in a production environment, but it 
is OK for casual use as long as the user understands it's limitations.  
In production environments there is also the liability issue with no 
support from a commercial company in the instance that a security 
issue, or some other critical issue, would be discovered with it.

IMHO, AppleWorks is a better (than OO.org), and more economical 
alternative to MS Office X, providing a slightly better level of Office 
compatibility (compared to OO.org), and having the advantage of full 
support from a commercial company.  There are usually two issues with 
Office substitute software - how compatible is it with Office formats, 
and cost.  In this instance you get what you pay for - OO.org is free 
offering the lowest level of compatibility, AppleWorks costs 
considerably less than MS Office ($79) but provides more functionality 
for the office user, and finally, MS Office itself is expensive, but is 
a top-notch office suite that actually surpasses it's Windows sister 
applications in features and ease-of-use.

I have some example documents generated with Windows 2000 and Office 
2000 that I can send you to try in the various office suites so you can 
see for yourself how they compare.
--
Chris