Open Office vs. Microsoft Office

Honestly, how do they stack up against each other? Ignoring the fact that MS Office obviously costs money (some would argue an extraordinary amount), what are the advantages of using either one?

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jkstech

I use openoffice almost exclusively, the only edge i've found with microsoft is outlook, at work we use alot of calendars and meetings, things that outlook handles properly, I haven't found a solution for that in the open source arena, evolution is close, but there really needs to be something open source that can fully integrate with exchange server or at least have the same capabilities, but i haven't looked at many other mail servers and what they can do, i've heard of sendmail but that's about it....

advantage for open office is that it's free, can handle microsoft office files, exports to pdf, and can save in microsoft office format if you want

for most users it is enough, especially at home, but if your office is like mines then it's very hard to replace outlook, not for the email but for all the other functions it performs

JDMurray

I use both OpenOffice and Microsoft Office. OO is a full-featured, fully-supported clone of MS Office that run on Windows/Linux/Mac OS X/other OSes and is completely free. Besides the ability to create data files and documents that can be shared by many operating systems, OO is a very easy set of software applications to learn and use for people who already know MS Office.

They only draw-back that keeps me from going completely with OO is that it is not (yet) 100% feature-compatible with MS Office. For example, you'll find that Impress is extremely good at creating slideshow presentations, but does not work 100% the same as PowerPoint. And Writer does not support several useful features that Word does, such as document markup and change tracking (if you use Writer to open and save a Word document that has tracked changes Writer will remove them from the document). As much as I love OO, while I still need to interface with people who use MS Office, I can't (yet) go 100% with OpenOffice.

Darthn3ss

overall it works well compared to office. my school uses it instead of buying office for every computer. we have office in a few labs at most.

Paul Boz

LSU has a Microsoft partnership so as a student I've got office 2007 enterprise for free, and I love it. The layout is much more intuitive than office versions from the past, and looks nicer / has better formatting than open office. I've got open office installed on some servers at work for the simple fact that it comes pre-packaged with them, but otherwise I just use MS Office. I'm sure if I ever had to pay for Office I'd use Open, but until that day comes I'll just stick with what I'm familiar with.

Darthn3ss

I'd have access to free MS software but my school apparently forgot to pay for the academic alliance this time around... lol.

blackmage439

Awesome. Thanks for the replies.

I, too prefer the sleeker look and functionality of MS Office over OO. However, I don't plan on spending the $$$ for a full-fledged version of MS Office 2007 or even 2003... yet anyway. :P

sthomas

I like both MS Office and OpenOffice. I know of some non profit organizations that use Open Office instead of MS Office. In my opinion Microsoft Office is better, but since I have been considering moving to Linux on my personal PC/notebook I will start using Open Office more.

bighornsheep

Since the two products is basically one trying to clone the other(& more), you can not fairly compare them...it's more a question of "how well is Open Office a replacement of MS Office?"

As JD already mentioned, if you do not inter-change the apps once you have created the documents, both products are practically the same, MOST of what people will usually need in an office suite is available for free.

OpenOffice as I have noticed does not have as good compatibility with unicode fonts As MS office does...other than that, use OO if you dont want to spend money.

ps. I hate Office 2007, so when I am sick of Office 2003 or OO comes out with more features, I may consider switching entirely to OO

sprkymrk

Open Office takes 10 times (literally) longer to open/launch than MS Office. It's a known issue that developers are working on, and should be corrected soon (so they have promised for over a year now).

I like MS Office better, but if it was my own money I had to shell out I might have a different opinion.

JDMurray

sprkymrk wrote:

Open Office takes 10 times (literally) longer to open/launch than MS Office.

Which program(s)? I only use Writer and Impress and I don't notice that they take any longer to start without loading a document than Word or PowerPoint. Maybe there are issues with specific document features (e.g., markups, comments) that cause slow loading in OO in some cases.