March 27, 2004

Office Alternative

Zombyboy has been using OpenOffice and finds it to be a good alternative to M$ Office. From his review:

If you are a hardcore user of all of Office's applications and functionality, it's probably worth the money. For the rest of us, the low cost should make OpenOffice an obvious choice, even given the large download.
I do not currently use OpenOffice but have in the past and concur with Zombyboy's review. If I were getting a new home PC I think it would be a good fit and it would be just fine for my small business as well.

Update (3/29): I should probably have rechecked at least the spreadsheet module before joining in the above recommendation. Please read Jim Henley's comment.

Posted by Steve on March 27, 2004
Comments

I like OO's word processor fine, and use it for my professional writing. But the spreadsheet is so far below the capabilities of even Excel 97 I don't even use it at home (where most of what I do is manage referrer tracking).

Thesis: The people who qualify as Microsoft HATERS are not the people who use Excel.

Posted by Jim Henley at March 28, 2004 7:05 AM

Hey, I'm not a MS hater! And even though I'm a graphic designer, my laptop runs XP, my home computer runs Mac OS 9, and my work computers are OS 10.2 and 2000.

I just don't like paying for things I'm not actually going to use.

I actually made a quick spreadsheet on Saturday and found it a little clunkier than Excel, but my needs are pretty minimal. For me, it was perfect.

Posted by zombyboy at March 29, 2004 8:30 PM
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