OT: Free Open Office Suite (Word, Excel, PP)

jkrepner wrote on 3/1/2006, 2:32 PM

Sun Microsystems has a free alternative to the Microsoft Office suite called Open Office. It has everything that you'd expect and even allows you to open and save files in the various formats (.doc, .xls, .ppt) from Microsoft. I needed to load Office 2000 on my editing workstation (to copy and paste some funky symbols from Word) and for reasons that escape me, it wouldn't install. I kept getting disk failures. Anyway, in a last ditch effort I installed Open Office's Writer program and it worked well. Not that MS doesn't deserve money for writing code, but sometimes you just need a quick spell check or a place to copy and paste text and not the full blown office suite. Anyway, here is the link. I was very impressed.

http://www.openoffice.org/

Comments

rmack350 wrote on 3/1/2006, 3:12 PM

Open Office is getting quite good. It's got a bit of a history to it, was Star Office before Sun bought it.

Open Office is the free version of this. Sun also sells a for-pay version.

Open Office is what my father uses. Now that he's totally reliant on Social Security Insurance, free is all he can afford. Kind of makes you wonder what people on limited incomes would use if the only thing around was MS Office. Many can barely pay for prescription meds, let alone a software license.

Rob Mack

farss wrote on 3/1/2006, 4:21 PM

MS does give Wordpad away with the OS, nothing like the full Word but more than adequate for most tasks, I use Wordpad a lot and (shudder) I still use Edit from the DOS prompt a lot.
Actually one thing I've been searching for and never been able to find is a good ASCII editor, used to have one that one of our guys wrote in Delphi back years ago but dumb Bob never kept a copy.

Bob.

jrazz wrote on 3/1/2006, 6:07 PM

Here is a whole list of open source software for Windows

I don't even have MS Office installed anymore on my machine. Open Office 2.0 does everything I need. Although, there are some issues with the transitions under its "power point" program Impress.

j razz

Chienworks wrote on 3/1/2006, 6:14 PM

We looked at OpenOffice when we wanted to bring in 20 or so new data collection workstations. The problem we found was that the Access scripts we had generated over the years weren't supported. We would either have to go back to simple query screens (too much chance for errors) or have me write all the input forms and processing as Visual Basic programs. It ended up being a lot cheaper to buy a bunch of Office 97 Pro licenses on ebay instead.

TheHappyFriar wrote on 3/1/2006, 6:14 PM

Yes, OO.org is nice. I've been using it for a few years. Back in college I used StarOffice. It was part of Sun then but if you paid you got phone support and (GASP!) a printed manual.

It's also ineresting to note that the OpenOffice 2 format was submitted to be considerd an official "universal" application format, one that any app could have access to (you cna now really... it's jsut an xml file). MS submitted their own version too but as we know, any "universal" format that deals with MS is eventuatly made MS friendly only (IE C,C++, Java... all the MS versions have many non-standard MS only functions that no other OS supports)

DrLumen wrote on 3/1/2006, 10:23 PM

Open Office is a good alternative to M$. At home, I don't have to worry about interoperability with other people so I use the WordPerfect Office Suite (old habits die hard).

On a like note, there is a good free graphics program which also is open source. It is called the GIMP. Pretty good for free. It is a lot like Photoshop. Plus, it supports scripting languages like Perl, Python, etc...

B.Verlik wrote on 3/2/2006, 2:14 AM

Yes, Open Office makes PDF files pretty good too.

jrazz wrote on 3/2/2006, 5:33 AM

The only thing with the pdf files is that they are image only. No search, no setup, no features except that it is in a .pdf format that cannot be altered. I wish this feature had more options, but to get that, I guess you need to buy adobe's product.

j razz

TheHappyFriar wrote on 3/2/2006, 7:20 AM

there's non-adobe PDF makes but they all cost $$$. OO at least lets you make PDF's to print out, which is what I use them for. Formating is always the same on any computer! :)

prairiedogpics wrote on 3/2/2006, 8:46 AM

I jumped on the OpenOffice 2.0 bandwagon and had a horrible experience.
Downloaded it, installed it, showed my wife how to use it for a big project she wanted to work on. She used it without incident for two weeks. Then, out of the blue, one day OO2.0 decides all the files she created are corrupt. No restore utility worked, nor did any inquiry/response from any forum.

Went back to (grudgingly) using Microsoft Word, which doesn't consider it's own files corrupt.

Proceed with caution.

RichMacDonald wrote on 3/2/2006, 10:10 AM

>there's non-adobe PDF makes but they all cost $$$.

Not as convenient, but try ghostview and gsview.

fldave wrote on 3/2/2006, 10:19 AM

farss,
Here is a good ASCII text editor I've used for years. No more development, no support. Works great for my needs. Very fast, small footprint which makes it quick to load text files.

http://www.lancs.ac.uk/staff/steveb/cpaap/pfe/default.htm
Interesting overview of it

or download.com:
http://www.download.com/3640-2352-904159.html

Edited: Sorry, the name of it is PFE - Programmers File Editor

farss wrote on 3/2/2006, 1:54 PM

Thanks for that, does much the same as the good old Edit but with an easier interface.

The old, old app that our guy wrote though could display control characters, e.g. a carriage return would be displayed as "C/R", fitted into single character space obviously. The old dumb serial terminals had this feature as well which is basically what he was emulating. You could also switch to binary view, very handy at times.

Bob.

fldave wrote on 3/2/2006, 2:39 PM

Bob,
Then you might want to check out HackMan editor. Should be able to find it through Google. ASCII, HEX, etc. Had it for several years also. I'm an old mainframe guy, so SPF-PC is one of my favorites, not sure if it is out with a free version, kind of doubt it.