

Ask HN: Do you recommend Open Office? - zeynel1

I decided not to buy Office suite that came with the laptop when it will expire next week. Are there Open Office users here? I know it opens Excel files. Is the spreadsheet as good as Excel? Are you happy with Open Office as an alternative to Office? Thank you.
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bbb
I use Open Office and iWork on a Mac, and Open Office on Linux. On the Mac,
Open Office's GUI sticks out as ugly and buggy. I think it's ok, but not
great, on Linux, though. (This probably reflects that the Open Office port to
Mac is still relatively new.)

I prefer Open Office Writer to Word because the way that it handles styles and
document hierarchy make more sense to me. Also, the document layout seems to
be relatively stable; at least I haven't observed many cascading layout
catastrophes in Open Office Writer yet (as opposed to Word).

A big downside of Open Office Writer is its inability to embed many file types
as figures (for example, you can't embed PDF). Apple's Pages is much better in
this regard.

I dont use spreadsheets much, but even my light use brings Apple's Numbers to
its knees. Open Office Calc is much better in this regard. However, Open
Office's charts looks like crap, and Excel's chart feature is powerful but a
pain to use. Numbers' charts are easy to use and quite pretty, but Numbers
breaks down in flames for even moderately-sized documents (as in _click,
click, draw chart, go get coffee, come back in 5min, Numbers still not
responding_ ). I now crunch my data in Open Office Calc or Python and render
down-sampled graphs with Numbers.

Open Office Impress is terrible. You are pretty much limited to bullet points,
images, and ugly transitions. I hate PowerPoint. Keynote is great; there is no
way I am ever going back to a presentation package without a "magic move"
transition.

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makmanalp
Regarding impress, the transitions and effects are indeed pretty horrible, but
I've never seen any serious presentation with bouncing words and spinny
slides. It looks corny and unprofessional.

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bbb
True, but that's true for any feature if you use it just for the feature's
sake. You can use animations for so much more than that. For example, it can
be very illustrative to animate a data structure manipulation.

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jcapote
All the time. Especially for it's export to pdf feature; can't believe people
still pay for "pdf printers"...

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azim
I'm a Linux user with Open Office 3.0 by night and Win XP with MS Office 2003
by day. A friend recently sent me a .docx file from MS Office 2k7. I was
unable to open it in OO 3.0 but it worked fine in Word 2003 (it's supposed to
work in OO). Just yesterday I typed a Word 2003 doc with heavy use of
formatting... OO was unable to preserve the margins. I've found that Excel
spreadsheets which make heavy use of macros will open but the macros probably
won't work. That being said, I used Open Office exclusively when I was in
school and personally felt the UI was easier to use didn't find the features
lacking. I've never had trouble taking a file from OO to MSO, but the reverse
will often have cosmetic defects.

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CyberFonic
YES ! Open Office has been my only office package for over two years now. Use
it mostly on Ubuntu but also on a spare Windows XP notebook. No problems
sharing files between the two environments. Send documents, etc to others in
PDF. Have struck some compatability issues reading Office 2007 files, but so
do Office 2003, etc users. I just ask people to SaveAs in an older version.

I have tried Office 2007 out of curiosity, for me it was less of a transition
effort to go to OO than to get used to MSO'07.

For publication quality writing I use Lyx and Latex. Lets me concentrate on
the content and not futz with styles, etc.

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ryne
I've used Open Office in the past and advocated it to my friends but I
hypocritically use Office. The ribbon for all it's criticism seems to be
highly functional, aesthetically pleasing and usable (using pictorial
representations that aren't 16x16). There's a "Save as XPS/PDF" plugin for
Office as well, no one has mentioned which works fine. I only use LaTeX for
technical documents with a lot of math, but the Office equation editor does
the job nicely with a few quirks here and there though. My only qualm is the
lack of ligatures and kerning in Office, which will hopefully be added in '10.

~~~
CyberFonic
I would think that for touch typists (those that avoid the mouse) Latex is
more productive that Office. The typesetting is far superior.

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sireat
I've been using Open Office almost exclusively (over MS Office) for the last
three years on both Windows and Linux.

For basic day to day tasks OO works very well.

If you want to accomplish something more esoteric, you can probably do it(and
there might be more than one way), but you will have to look at external help
sites, and that might take some time.

Then again, trickier things in MS Office might take some time to learn, as
well.

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minsight
Open Office has improved spectacularly over the years. It's very good for
people who just want to work with data. There was a time when its
interoperability with Office was poor, but that has come a long way. These
days interoperability between versions of Office is poor, so there are times
when OO can do a better job of reading a file created by a different vintage
of Office.

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mark_l_watson
If I have to use a word processor, then I use Pages for OS X. The full screen
mode is nice, and it seems more responsive that OO or Office.

IMO, best is LaTex, but some collaborators, publishers, and customers don't
like it. The advantage of LaTex is that you can spend more time writing and
less time worrying about styling and formatting.

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brianmckenzie
I've used it extensively when compatibility with a bunch of MS Office users
was not a concern. Never had any trouble opening other peoples' MS Office
files, but I wouldn't trust it if I had to send lots of files to people.

For home use it's superb - even my computer-illiterate parents are using it
exclusively.

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makmanalp
Custom build of OO, with added features: <http://www.go-oo.org/>

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RiderOfGiraffes
I use Open Office all the time and have no problems with it. My wife does
proof reading and she has to use Word, because taking a Word documment into OO
then exporting it back out again as Word format changes the formatting.

Personally, I only use OpenOffice and have no problems.

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planetmcd
I frequently have issues opening word documents from some users of Word 2007.
I know this is likely an MS Problem, but if interoperability is a concern, I
would be wary. That said. I use it for most of my tasks. I also find OO
spreadsheet's csv import to be superior.

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byoung2
I use OpenOffice, and Calc is better than Excel. It has regular expression
find/replace, and no 65,536 row limit. It is my favorite part of OpenOffice.
I've used Writer a few times, mainly for the PDF export.

For most other uses, I just use Google Docs though.

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Anon84
As long as you don't have to send/receive MS Office files to/from other
people, it should be fine. In my experience there are still some horrible
incompatibility issues (specially in formatting).

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slmbrhrt
It's fine for working with someone else's doc files. Sometimes you have to
bend. For producing my own work, I'll take LaTeX over Office any day.

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parse_tree
Yes. Completely happy. As everyone else said, the export to pdf is great.

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wallflower
OpenOffice has the best save-as PDF feature.

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bbb
I beg to differ. On a Mac, Open Office's export to PDF is broken in weird ways
(line weight sometimes wrong, fonts rendered incorrectly, other glitches), but
printing to PDF from Pages (or any other application that allows you to print,
including Open Office itself) has not yet let me down so far (and I use it a
lot). NeoOffice, when I was still using it, did not have this problem, but
failed in other interesting ways.

~~~
wallflower
Finally got a Mac so I'm having to unlearn some assumptions/habits. Thanks for
the FYI.

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zeynel1
Thanks to everyone with your comments. I downloaded it and so far it is
working great for me. There are many little things that I like much better
than excel and word. I am glad I don't have to deal with the ribbon anymore.
And also it appears to be faster. Help is very useful and unlike excel help,
it is well organized, and very easy to find answers. I think overall this is a
better user experience than MS Office.

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drhowarddrfine
My company, of almost 30 employees, uses OO exclusively. We also use
GoogleDocs if we're on the road and don't have access to a laptop. Nowadays,
we have no issues with it at all. We just don't see the need for 90% of the MS
Office features that we would never use, especially at that price.

