OpenOffice.org
I blogged earlier about my first impressions of Open Office. I was pretty impressed, but I had not used it enough to give it a proper review. I still haven't used it enough to be intimitely familiar with it, but I understand the its strengths and even its weakneses a little better. I like the program even more than I did initially.
One of the painful things I found was that the calc program help files seemed inoperational. Although calc is pretty intuitional it was a bug, I needed to resolve. The OpenOffice.org web site is poorly orgnazed and I couldn't find any help with my help problem. Fortunatly Google was much more helpful. The problem was it had 4 files that need to be replaced in the help section, and within a few minutes I was copying files and had my fuly functional help system.
The next annoyining thing I found was the lack of documentation. No users manual. Well I found some pretty good ones at the OpenOffice.org site. Ok what about support? There are a couple of forums out there that are pretty decent, but I found the users@0pen0ffice.org mail list very useful, Its a very heavy list and I found that using the newsgroup option very handy. So now I have Help, Manuals, and support. And it very good quality.
Its more than a "It's not Microsoft" thing, I really like it more than Office. Its more intuitive, and has better free documentation. Now I'm not a heavy duty user, but creating Templates, making a chart from some statistics was a snap. There are just a ton of things which seem so easy to do, like importing and exporting my Outlook address book. It even supports Avery Labels, so I was able to quickly make up some business cards for my campaign.
Although I'm aware of some limitations importing macros and such, I haven't run into any that are actually limit me yet. It seems more intuitive to do things that I haven't done before than MS Office. Probably the thing I'll use the MS product for if I'm required to create templates that someone else needs to work on.
I still have a lot to learn. I need to familiarize myself with Base the database program, and I would like to learn more of the Calc program, but its a pretty slick package, not just by open source standards, but by comercial software standards.
Opensource might become the world standard for many users. It is finding popularity in other countrys faster than it is in the U.S. Because the output files are also an open standard, other programs can be written to access files that can accessible by OpenOffice. As Word replaced, Wordperfect and Excell replaced QuatroPro/Lotus. Office just might be the application to topple Microsoft as the Business software leader, it is that good.
posted by Liberty @ 2:08 PM
2 Comments:
I've been using Open Office for a few years on our small business's computer. It's pretty good, great for a free program.
I don't know if it's good enough to use for tech writing. Being able to open Office/Word docs and save as Office/Word is fantastic.
Rob,
Have you downloaded 2.0 yet? I think this version could do it. The biggest problem I see is that file transfers to MS users could result in subtle changes. that could be maddening. Please let me know if you decide to give it a go.
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