New OpenOffice (a FREE Office App) Available

Jonathan Neal wrote on 10/10/2006, 5:33 PM
OpenOffice.org has released version 2.0.4 of its popular application. OpenOffice.org is an office suite application comprising a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation program, vector graphics editor, and database component.

It is available for many different computing platforms including Microsoft Windows, Unix-like systems including Linux and Solaris, and Mac OS X. It is intended to be a compatible, free alternative to Microsoft Office. It supports the OpenDocument standard for data interchange.

The project aims to compete with Microsoft Office and emulate its look and feel where suitable. It can also read and write most of the file formats found in Microsoft Office, and many other applications. The ability to read and write Microsoft Office documents is an essential feature of the suite for many users. OpenOffice.org has been found to be able to open files of older versions of Microsoft Office and damaged files[2] that newer versions of Microsoft Office itself cannot open.

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Comments

TheHappyFriar wrote on 10/10/2006, 5:56 PM
i've been using that program for years. love it. I used staroffice back when it was free too. Very nice programs.
krew wrote on 10/10/2006, 7:23 PM
OpenOffice is great, I really like it. I used MS Office for years but I decided to try out OpenOffice when I realized how many hundreds of dollars it would cost to upgrade my version of MS(!)

To me, OpenOffice is superior and not because it's free. I love it because it can do everything I need it to easily and fairly intuitively, and I don't have to deal with all of the horrible MS Office glitches. I'd definitely encourage others to try it.
Harold Brown wrote on 10/10/2006, 7:26 PM
I have used Open Office for 3 years. Great stuff. Power Points are not always perfect but otherwise I like the product.
TheHappyFriar wrote on 10/10/2006, 8:10 PM
it's PP program is it's weakest link. It's nowhere near as good as ppoint. But everything else is excelent. A few people i know have had issues with it, but I've never had problems.

DataMeister wrote on 10/10/2006, 11:50 PM
You are talking about the RC3 beta there. I almost got excited there thinking you were pointing out the official 2.0.4 release. The official version is still 2.0.3.

On the subject of PowerPoint, I agree, it's the weakest part of the suite. I personaly use OpenOffice, but the church I go to still has to use MS Office, mainly because of lack of dual monitor support in OOs presentation software. If they could fix that, we'd be set.

Course there's also the fact that most of the worship managment applications will read Power Point files and not the OpenOffice files. So maybe we aren't completely set in the church environment just yet.
je@on wrote on 10/11/2006, 9:34 AM
Just another voice in favor of Open Office... Now if we could get Sony to port Vegas to Linux we could wean ourselves from dependancy on MS. --- Free. Free at last!