Skip to main content

Has Open Office finally come of Age?

A few months back I got a new laptop but due to a hiccup in the IT department of the organisation I work for there was a delay in getting Microsoft Office installed on the machine. The Laptop was no use to me without some Office Program so I  installed the latest version of Open Office as a stop-gap for the couple of days it would take to sort out the IT issue.

Here I am three months later still using Open Office version 3.2.1 on the Laptop. It just works and it works well enough for me not to be bothered about replacing it. I use a word processor, spreadsheet and a presentation programme on a daily basis and the Open Office equivalents do everything I need them to do and are just as easy to use as the Microsoft versions. In fact I slightly prefer the default style and menu layout of Open Office Writer while I think Power point still scores slightly in usability over Open Office Impress. Overall its a tie.

Most impressive is the compatibility. A few years back I experimented with an early version of Open Office and abandoned it quickly because of format corruption. Now however after months of use I haven't had a problem opening documents nor have any of my colleagues had a problem reading my documents. I save everything in Office 97-2003 format (*.doc, *.xls, *.ppt) even though OO recommends using their default format instead but it has never given me a problem. To be honest even if I was using Office 2010 I would still have to save in these formats because a surprising number of people still can't read the newer *.docx and *.xlx formats.

I still use Microsoft Office on my desktops but I am strongly considering a complete move to Open Office including using their ODF file format. I particularly like the fact that it would remove any ambiguity over licensing on multiple PCs.
Labels:

Comments

Thallian said…
I agree, Open Office is no longer a write-off piece of software. It's on par with Microsoft in many ways, and its way above it on price. (its free)
11:30 pm
mbp said…
The most striking thing for me Thallian is that I have been using Microsoft Office on my dektopsand Open Office on my laptop in parallel for several months without really noticing the difference.

Granted I am not really a power user, although I have been known to do some pretty fancy things with spreadsheets.
7:56 am
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Android Tip 3: Sharing a Folder between multiple users of an Android device

Android has allowed multiple user logins for quite a while now. This is can be very useful for tablets which are shared by family members. Normally Android erects strict Chinese walls between users preventing them from using each others apps and viewing each others files. This is a useful security feature and ensures your kids don't mess up your work spreadsheets when screwing around on the tablet and should also prevent them from buying €1,000 worth of Clash of Candy coins on your account. Sometimes however you really do want to share stuff with other users and this can prove surprisingly difficult. For example on a recent holiday I realised that I wanted to share a folder full of travel documents with my wife. Here are some ways to achieve this. 1. If you have guaranteed internet access  then you can create a shared folder on either Dropbox or Google drive. Either of these has the great advantage of being able to access the files on any device and the great disadvantage of bein...
50 comments
Read more

Portal 2 two screen coop on one PC.

I mentioned before that I intended to try Portal 2 in "unofficial split screen co-op mode. Well split screen on a small computer monitor is a recipe for a headache especially when the game defies gravity as much as portal. However a minor bit of extra fiddling allowed us to drive two seperate screens from one PC. The Steam forums describes a complicated method of doing this that I couldn't get working so this simpler method which worked for me might be of use to someone. 1. First I followed the instructions in this post to get split screen multi-player working: http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1847904 A minor issue not mentioned is that you need to enable the console from the keyboard/mouse options menu I am using keyboard and one wired Xbox360 controller as suggested. Getting the controller to switch to channel 2 was tricky at first but as Chameleon8 mentions plugging it out and in again during loading works. The trick for me was to do the plug / p...
2 comments
Read more

Exploiting Checkpoints in Deadspace 3

Dead Space 3 has a rather strange save system where inventory is saved when you quit the game even though progress through the story is lost. The game has both "hard" and "soft" checkpoints. The soft checkpoints are far more frequent but are not permanently saved. If you die while playing you respawn at the last soft checkpoint but if you quit the game  you will return to the previous hard checkpoint. Since hard checkpoints are relatively infrequent you can lose quite a bit of progress unless you are disciplined enough to always wait till the next hard checkpoint (indicated by a symbol in the corner of the screen) before quitting. This sucks of course and is the type of thing which convinces me that save anywhere is much better than rigid checkpoints. The developers of Dead Space 3 decided to soften the blow of losing progress by allowing you to keep your entire inventory and health when you quit even though you lose your progress in the story. Collecting loot ...
2 comments
Read more