Anyone familiar w/ OpenOffice.org?

Question

Wondering if anyone's used it... benefited from it... liked/dislike it... etc.?

Note:
My OS - 2000
My Office - 2003
thx!
Rosa~

Thx, everyone, for your answers!
Just chkg in hopes I understand correctly... I "keep" Office2003 after installing OpenOffice, right???

Answer 1

I like it enough not to pay for MS Word. There are some functions, especially in the PowerPoint equivalent Impress, where OpenOffice (OO) is just not as powerful as PowerPoint. However, I used it throughout my four years of university for word processing, spreadsheets and powerpoint presentations to good effect.

One place where it lacks is in the database software. I was not able to link my OO database to anything practical, and there was no option for saving it into Access format.

It may take you a little while to get used to it, but it's definitely good for general use.

Answer 2

Try the free, and M$-Office compatible, Open Office from:

Included: Writer (like Word), Calc (Excel), Impress (PowerPoint), Base (Access), Draw (M$-Paint) and Math

Just make sure that if you want others to be able to view the documents using M$-Office Word, for example, save them using "Save as..." in .doc format, instead of the default .odt format. Or use the built-in PDF creation feature.

One month after buying M$-Office 2003,I discovered Open Office and never looked back.

Answer 3

I think it works great. It is compatible with most Microsoft Office documents. We packaged it with out computers when I worked for a computer shop and we built our own computers to sell.