Looking For Excel-like Application

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Whaleboy
OOo is slow as hell, no kind of recovery mechanism if something dies (MS Word has saved my arse a number of times )... it's poorly thought out. About the only thing going for it feature wise is the PDF thing which is a nice touch.

You can always use autosave...

[Whaleboy]

I type fast, Word will usually save it as it was when I last saw it so I don't lose work. There's no comparison.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Whaleboy
There's no comparison.

Of course. OpenOffice is Free Software, Microsoft Office is expensive proprietary stuff.

Free Software

[Asher]

One is a professional program, and one is an amateur program. That's the difference.

[Whaleboy]

Of course. OpenOffice is Free Software, Microsoft Office is expensive proprietary stuff.

Other than the price. I couldn't program a computer to save my life, I could read a book in 10 minutes and write a "hello world" program, and call it free software. It's licence doesn't carry some magical, mystical force that automatically makes it better than a similar program that's proprietary. Yes OOo is free, which is good. That means that if you can't buy MSO you have an option. If MSO is so better that it justifies the money spent on it, which it could well be, then it's still a better choice. In terms of quality there's no comparison, MSO is better.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Whaleboy
In terms of quality there's no comparison, MSO is better.

You can set the the autosave to one minute intervals. I don't care how fast you type, you are not going to lose more than 100 words even if your computer crash. OTOH, I have seem MS Office did funny things to documents, shredding them mysteriously.

You are right, in terms of quality there's no comparison. However MSO is not the better one.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Asher
One is a professional program, and one is an amateur program. That's the difference.

I have never heard you call any MS program "amateur" before. What did you do to the real Asher?

[Asher]

You are so out to lunch, old man.

Either that or you have a terrible sense of humour.

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by Asher
What's the main problem with the default paradigms?

OpenOffice is noticably worse IMO. Borderline "terrible".

Openoffice makes me want to puke. I prefer using gedit on the school's linux computers.

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger
Of course. OpenOffice is Free Software, Microsoft Office is expensive proprietary stuff.

Free Software

Notepad's free too.

[Fve Crathva]

Originally posted by Whaleboy
OOo is slow as hell, no kind of recovery mechanism if something dies (MS Word has saved my arse a number of times )... it's poorly thought out. About the only thing going for it feature wise is the PDF thing which is a nice touch.

Also it's free so if you can't afford MS Office it's not like there isn't an alternative, but it's a poor second in terms of quality. Is Office ~£80 better? Debateable... considering price they're pretty much even I suppose.

OpenOffice 2.0b has a recovery feature. Of course, last time it crashed and I needed to use the recovery feature, the recovery feature also crashed. And then the crash report tool crashed.

When it runs, 2.0b is also a whole lot faster than the stable version. MS Office will always be the better product, but OpenOffice is pretty good for free software, especially 2.0b (I'd say OOo 1.1 is a step up from Office '97, but I haven't used any more recent version of Office enough to compare 2.0b). And it comes with the kickass PDF exporter.

SP

[muxec]

OpenOffice works better with linux. It has better multilingual support than MS Office.

[Kuciwalker]

OpenOffice is CRAP on linux. It's crap period.

[Mercator]

OpenOffice is good enough for me. Then again, I can't remember the last time I've seriously used any office product. WordPad usually suffices for the little "word-processing" I have to do. Consequently, I don't have any installed now either.

[St Leo]

OpenOffice is rather nice IMHO, but I've switched to AbiWord on Linux because it's lighter.