Open Office 3.0 versus Office 2000?

shootist16

shootist16

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I have Office 2000 Professional. I've used it forever, but I wonder if Open Office 3.0 is "better"? I'm not going to spend the $$$ on Office 2007. My wife's computer uses Vista and there were some issues with Outlook 2000. I ended up downloading Thunderbird for her. Which made me think that maybe Office 2000 is a little long in the tooth and time to upgrade. What say you?
 
Better is a relative term. I use it, and it works pretty well. The interface is a bit dated, but for free, you really cannot complain. If you use excel extensivly, it is a nightmare. Microsoft uses different formulas in certain areas and the sheets will not translate well. Not an issue if you only use word, but some of the other stuff hoses up pretty good depending on how complex your documents are.

That being said, Office 2007 is a wonderful suite in my opinion. Once you get used to the ribbon, it is great. Outlook 2007 is far and away better than Thunderbird (but in my opinion, most mail programs are).
 
shootist16 said:
I have Office 2000 Professional. I've used it forever, but I wonder if Open Office 3.0 is "better"? I'm not going to spend the $$$ on Office 2007. My wife's computer uses Vista and there were some issues with Outlook 2000. I ended up downloading Thunderbird for her. Which made me think that maybe Office 2000 is a little long in the tooth and time to upgrade. What say you?
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What do you use it for?

Unless you use some very advanced VisualBasic programming, or some other Excel-only functionality, 2007 is NOT worth the money. Also, the "ribbon" interface of 2007 is the worst UI invention ever. It makes it easy to teach the brain-dead to use Excel, but for anyone who already knows what they're looking for, it only adds waste of time and a healthy dose of frustration. Open Office 3 UI is much closer to the Office 2000 UI that you're so used to, compared to Office 2007.

I would say that for most of us, MS Office is BY FAR not worth the money. But hey - this is something that you can try for free, so you have nothing to lose. Download OpenOffice 3 and try using it for a few weeks. If you don't like it, you can always buy Excel.

Comparing Office 2000 to Open Office 3, I would pick OO3...

That being said, you simply have to use the tool for the job. OO3 is good, but not perfect (although it's made major strides since 2.4). Taken as a whole it's not really competitive with MSO, given an expert user with advanced needs. For the rest of us, it's 6 of one, half-dozen of another.
 
I uninstalled office 2000 on my wife's laptop and installed Open office. I think since it's free I'll install it on mine and see how I like it.
 
I'm still using Office 97 at home and have been toying with upgrading to OO3. We use MS Office 2003 at work (Fortune 500 Corporation) and have been told we will NOT be switching to Office 2007. We will wait for the next configuration.

My wife has Office 2007. I have tried it and I consider it an abomination from the lowest circles of the nether regions . Can't find anything. Half the deep commands are now so hidden I can't access them at all. The GUI of Office 2007 sucks little green toads.
 
gnius said:
Also, the "ribbon" interface of 2007 is the worst UI invention ever. It makes it easy to teach the brain-dead to use Excel, but for anyone who already knows what they're looking for, it only adds waste of time and a healthy dose of frustration.
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Gotta agree with that. I got a "free" copy of Office 2007 (part of the licencing agreement with work is that employees get a home use copy for $20) and I hate the new interface. I suppose once you get used to it, its not too bad but it is so different from the old Office drop-down menu interface, and oranized so much differently, that it will take a lot to get used to it. Of course part of the problem is we are still using the old version of Office at work, so I'm flipping back and forth between two very differnt versions. :(
 
I'm using Office XP, 2002 I guess. I have no intention of switching until it just won't work any more. It gets a lot of use, I know where everything is and don't have to think too much about the interface.

With something new, I'd be completely lost. A word processing program doesn't need a flashy, "ooooh look what we can do with technology," interface. It needs to be simple, and Office 2000/XP has been the best in my opinion.

As long as the file extentions are interchangable I'll be fine if I do have to upgrade in the future. What I don't want to be forced to do is convert all my documents, or lose formatting if I choose not to convert.
 
I'm a technical writer by trade. Comparing Write to Word, I'll give the win to Write in OpenOffice.

At home, I've run Open Office for years. I've not bought anything MS except for the operating system. Simply no value in that proposition.

For my purposes at home, the rest of the suite is sufficient.
 
phatch said:
I'm a technical writer by trade. Comparing Write to Word, I'll give the win to Write in OpenOffice.
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I have had a copy of various editions of MS Office on my home machine for the last 10 years but I think for most people, the only reason to spend the bucks for any version of MS Office it to be compatable with their computing environment at work. If you don't need to transfer documents or spreadsheets back and forth from your work to home computers, I would just get one of the less expensive or free office suites.
 
mdauben said:
I have had a copy of various editions of MS Office on my home machine for the last 10 years but I think for most people, the only reason to spend the bucks for any version of MS Office it to be compatable with their computing environment at work. If you don't need to transfer documents or spreadsheets back and forth from your work to home computers, I would just get one of the less expensive or free office suites.
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Unless you do a lot of advanced formatting, I have found that OO3 Word Processor and Spreadsheet are quite compatible with MSOffice. Remember - you can save files in MSOffice formats in OO3... you can even set that to be the default format.

The only place where serious problems arise, is the Presentation programs, where OO3 presentation is "compatible" with PowerPoint, but I'd give the compatibility a barely-passing "C-"
 
mdauben said:
I have had a copy of various editions of MS Office on my home machine for the last 10 years but I think for most people, the only reason to spend the bucks for any version of MS Office it to be compatable with their computing environment at work. If you don't need to transfer documents or spreadsheets back and forth from your work to home computers, I would just get one of the less expensive or free office suites.
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There's lots of ways to transfer data between the different suites with the various save as options. I do transfer data back and forth, But not in Excel as I don't use that professionally.
 
Since it's free, taking it for a test drive would have been exactly what I recommend. Let us know what you think of it.

Also, I HATE Office 2007. It's good that you aren't even considering it. I wouldn't even recommend it if it were free.
 
I miss Word for DOS. ;)
I've got Office2000 but I stopped reloading it on newer drives years ago. Too bloatware for me. I've got Open Office but these days I mainly use EditPad Lite. Don't have to do anything fancy anymore.
 
When my disk drive failed a year or so ago and I had to rebuild everything the only MS stuff I put back on there was XP. I installed Open Office and Thunderbird for the wife. A perfectly satisfactory arrangement and I haven't had any troubles with any of it. As others have said, if you're a heavy duty user of word and/or excel you may need to buy the MS stuff but, for general home duties, OO works just fine. I'm also using Firefox. Next time the computer dies I'm thinking of going Linux and OO for everything.

Quite possibly I'll put a virtual machine in there and have Windows 7 and Linux on the same box but I still won't buy any MS Office stuff.
 
gnius said:
The only place where serious problems arise, is the Presentation programs, where OO3 presentation is "compatible" with PowerPoint, but I'd give the compatibility a barely-passing "C-"
Click to expand...

I don't find PowerPoint to be terribly compatible with other MS Office programs, either. They talk to each other, but it's more like they pass variables rather than actually work as one.
 
So far I like Write quite a bit. I just don't see a reason for me to buy an updated version of Office.
 
I'm currently using Open Office on my home computer and don't really feel all the compelled to get Office 2007. I have Outlook 2007 for my emails, but that came with the package for my Internet service. Glad to hear Open Office is working out for ya.
 
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