IBM offers free office suite almost everyone loves it. But will it suck? Probably. For starters they name it IBM Symphony. Dubious idea. Blackberry’s new product. NBC will give away programming. And guess what? Today is the 25th anniversary of the smiley face. Google offers Powerpoint killer. Has unique features.
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#1,
I’ll take that to mean you have never actually used openoffice to finish work.
#3, I take it that OpenOffice isn’t necessarily good at finishing work?
Open Office is not a product that is supported by a company. Many corporations have IT policies that core tools have an ‘official’ support mechanism. Which is why Sun, and now IBM have a version of Open Office.
#4,
You should take it as, it isn’t necessairly good at anything.
I really wish Open Office was suitable for my work. Unfortunately it isn’t, for reasons far too tedious to explain here. Also, it tends to screw the format of Office documents. So what? Well, if like me your clients send you stuff to edit as Office documents and require the same returned to them, OO just doesn’t hack it. This – plus a couple of highly specialized applications that I need – is probably all that’s keeping me from converting totally to Linux.
We frequently use OOo in our office and it works very well. Writer and Calc are the main ones we use.
What kind of problems are you guys having??
#8,
Wow, I wish I was as optimistic as you. I haven’t looked at OO in a while, but the last time I did (I use Excell and Access quite heavily) I found the database component simply unusable (and slow). Also I tried to use Calc side by side Excell, and… Woah, they have a way to go. It wasn’t so much the features… Just looking at it it appears to have all the features I need, but once you try and use it… The first thing that comes to mind was all the extra button clicks I had to make to do simple things like edit a cell. Oh also the lack of a easy reference for function calls.
Like I said, it has been a while, and maybe things have improved, but for the amount of work to switch, vs the nominal cost of Office, and I am sticking with office for a good long time.
OK. We use it almost totally within our office and don’t have clients expect us to send them Office docs. I agree that would be a problem.
Apart from the formatting problems, what stops me from using OO may sound amazingly trivial but just happens to be vital for my work. Typically, I’m sent a big technical document of several hundred pages, which I have to edit. On, let’s say, page 15, I notice something that has to be changed and which I know will be repeated throughout the document. With Word, if I do a search and replace, afterwards it leaves me where I was, on page 15, so I can continue working. OO leaves me at the position of the last replace, which could be anywhere further down in the document, so I have to go back and find the place where I was before I did the replace. As I said, it sounds trivial, but repeat this several dozen times during a working day, as I need to, and it drives one crazy.
It looks like SNOPES doesn’t believe the Smiley Face anniversary:
http://www.snopes.com/computer/internet/smiley.asp
J/P=?
I’m goingto look into the smiley face thing myself since I think I have some pre-1982 stuff i can examine.
I switched to OO a couple of years ago and don’t miss MS at all.
The sheets I alter/create with OO calc are plugged into a much larger MS spreadsheet (with macros and whatever ) and the head office has never complained.
Best I can tell, the head office has no idea I’m using OO.
OO writer works great, too, although my needs are pretty simple.
As for IBM giving away their suite — it’s probably because there is no longer any profits in office suites.
What private person would ever spend big money on MS Office?
Google Docs, OO office and endless other freeware.