OT How is Open Office these days?

Is it usable yet?

Last time I tried it came almost completely unpreconfigured in every
respect and was a positive pain to use. Especially when needing to
interface with output from MS compliant sources.

 

steve auvache scribbled on the back of a napkin:

I find it pretty usable - most of my personal documents (both
spreadsheets and text documents) are written with OO.

It does even grok most of the M$ documents from work although I tend to
edit them on my craptop which has MSOffice installed.

 

Timo Geusch wrote

Well of all the things, the word grok was word of the day on July 15th
1999. Who'd have thought?

 

Pretty good IMHO. Dunno about Windows, but we get a nicely packaged
version called NeoOfficeJ on Mac OSX, which is a simple drag/drop
install.

The last time I tried OO on Windows it was so terribly slow though.

 

Andy Hewitt wrote

Last time I had it I used an 800M PII with 3/8G of memory. My hardware
has moved on a bit since then and I suspect this machine will be well up
to a bit of bloatware. It kin wants to be.

 

OpenOffice 2.0 should be coming out soon, and is supposed to be an
improvement on 1.whatever. Not tried the beta but these people:

http://www.linux-magazine.com/issue/51/OpenOffice_20_Preview.pdf

seem to like it.

 

TimP wrote

They have self confessed issues with things as fundamental as font
installation and management and the spellchecker. This is not software
for a newbie to the suite to be playing with. I was thinking more on
the lines of the latest stable version as a place to start.

Free innit? Appeals to that type dunnit? Kin long haired, dope
smoking, job dodging, soap allergic, cheapskates the lot of them.

 

steve auvache scribbled on the back of a napkin:

My main concern are the startup times. Once it's running it's about as
responsive as MS Office on both of my "end user" machines. And the
laptop isn't exactly a fast box.

 

Better than it was but if your main requirement is to be able to
interchange documents with people using MS Office, then you need to
use MS Office.

We use OO at work but all the client facing stuff is produced using MS
Office.

 

<Hands Steve a mirror>

 

Timo Geusch wrote

I have noticed actually that when using Access or similar that I get fat
and piss a lot. I think it is because I get bored waiting and have time
for extra tea and bickies

 

Ginge wrote

Exactly.

So ask yourself this, why am I not already their number one evangelist?
I find it very suspicious indeed.

 

IIRC , it has one of those "preload me" features that helps. So that it
acts like MS apps and has some chunks pre-loaded.

 

Ben wrote

Aren't there plug-ins and stuff then? I have no knowledge of this
whatsoever but I thought/hoped that bridges had been built.

 

Version 2.0 is in beta (that will be SO8 then)
Version 1.1.4 (Will be SO7) is very stable

We happilly import MS docs/spreadsheets and export if customer requires it.

 

Surely you just export it ?

 

Download it and have a play.

 

steve auvache scribbled on the back of a napkin:

You can save files in MS format (and you can save your text files as
PDFs without have expensive Adobe software installed) but at least the
older versions did barf on highly complex text layouts.

Plus if you've got extensions for Excel you need to use then I think
you wouldn't go anywhere with OO, either.

 

I was using a Celeron 400 I admit, but it was *way* slower than my iMac
400 of the same era.

Of course newer machines won't be so worried by slow bloatware.

 

It's more a case of they render things in documents slightly
differently. Enough to annoy you if you want your doc to look exactly
the same in Word as the Open Offic Word Processor. A case in point is
rendering of bullet points.

If you're just using it at home to do stuff for yourself, then you'll
get on fine with it. I'd never use it to send something to a client
who was running on Word though as I couldn't guarantee they'd see what
I see.